The book provides an overview of the right to counsel and the attorney-client privilege in the following 12 jurisdictions: China, Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, UK and USA.
The right to counsel is a fundamental right providing the accused access to justice in criminal proceedings. Lawyers can only practice their profession properly if clients have complete trust in their lawyer’s discretion. This trust is safeguarded by the attorney-client privilege, which is an indispensable part of every constitutional state and one of the most important professional duties of a lawyer. It is of particular importance in criminal proceedings regarding the protection of the confidentiality of lawyer-client communications in the different procedural stages, coercive measures as well as the various duties and interests in play. However, the communications protected by attorney-client privilege vary greatly from country to country. With regard to criminal investigations in an increasingly globalised world, where sophisticated tools enable broad digital investigations, there is an urgent need to clarify how this fundamental right is protected at both the national and supranational level.
Each chapter explores the regulations, practices and recent developments in each jurisdiction and was written by highly qualified experts in the legal field – from academia and practice alike. It identifies possible solutions and best practices, providing valuable insights for practitioners and law-making bodies alike regarding the actual protection (or lack thereof) of lawyer-client confidentiality in the pretrial and trial stage of criminal proceedings.
Lorena Bachmaier Winter
Professor of Law at Complutense University of Madrid. She holds a Law Degree (1989) and also in Political Science, specialization International Relations (1989), from the Complutense University Dr. iur. at Complutense University (1994), with award for the best doctoral thesis in public law. In 2015 she was awarded the prestigious Luis Portero Human Rights Award (Granada Royal Academy of Jurisprudence) and an honorary doctorate (Perú). She has written extensively on comparative law, human rights and criminal procedure, and the EU area of justice. She has been visiting scholar and guest lecturer in numerous Universities and academic institutions worldwide. She has worked as an international expert for the Council of Europe and other international organisations in the field of human rights standards and the rule of law in transitional democracies.
Stephen C. Thaman
Stephen C. Thaman (J.D., University of California, Berkeley; Dr. iur., University of Freiburg, Germany) is Professor of Law Emeritus at Saint Louis University, USA. He is the author of “Comparative Criminal Procedure: A Casebook Approach” (Carolina Acad. Press, 2nd edn. 2008), editor of “World Plea Bargaining” (Carolina Acad. Press, 2010) and “Exclusionary Rules in Comparative Perspective” (Springer, 2013), and co-editor of “Comparative Criminal Procedure” (Elgar, 2016). He was an Assistant Public Defender in Alameda County, California, from 1976–1987.
Veronica Lynn
Lic. iur. Veronica Lynn studied law in Zurich, where she also completed internships and trained with major corporate law firms. She was admitted to the bar in Switzerland in 2016 while simultaneously being a doctoral student at the University of Zurich, writing her PhD thesis on the attorney-client privilege and working as an academic research assistant at the chair for criminal law and criminal procedure law of Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Wohlers at the University of Basel. She specializes in white-collar crime, criminal defence and criminal aspects of information technology and disruptive technologies.
