Stephen C. Thaman – författare

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.

This book is a comparative study of the exclusion of illegally gathered evidence in the criminal trial , which includes 15 country studies, a chapter on the European Court of Human Rights, and a comparative synthetic conclusion.  No other book has undertaken such a broad comparative study of exclusionary rules, which have now become a  world-wide phenomenon. The topic is one of the most controversial in criminal procedure law, because it reveals a constant tension between the criminal court’s duty  to ascertain the truth, on the one hand, and its duty to uphold important constitutional rights on the other,  most importantly, the privilege against self-incrimination and the right to privacy in one''s home and one''s private communications. The chapters were contributed by noted world experts on the subject for the XVIII Congress of the International Academy of Comparative Law in Washington in July 2010.