PERSONAL AUTONOMY, THE PRIVATE SPHERE AND THE CRIMINAL LAW [...]... this volume are mainly concerned with England and Wales on the one hand and continental Europe – notably, although not exclusively, the Netherlands – on the other The major differences between the common law and civil law systems that these countries exemplify, are often simply accepted as the inevitable and everlasting result of the forces of history And yet, in theory at least, Europe as a whole increasingly... between privacy and criminal law is not restricted to dealing with new mechanisms for surveillance.6 In the areas of genetic and information technology, the questions which have arisen are whether the classical doctrines of the criminal law (homicide and assault law in the case of genetic technology, criminal property law in the case of computer crime) are sufficient, or whether a new corpus of law is appropriate... Field and C.M Pelser (eds), Invading the Private, supra n 7 11 And see J.R Spencer, The Case for a Code of Criminal Procedure” [2000] Criminal Law Review 000 6 Peter Alldridge and Chrisje Brants anything resembling a Code of Criminal Procedure in England and Wales Such rules as did govern police behaviour at common law grew out of two major sources – the law of criminal evidence and the civil law of... Such contradictions are, in themselves illustrative of the fragmentation of morality in late modern society, and of the contradictory demands and fears to which it gives rise On the one hand, people welcome both the expanding, international order and the dissipation of old moral certainties, demanding the right to use their freedom and autonomy as they see fit – including the right to withhold solidarity,... or to the society in which they live and to develop their own moral convictions and norms, even if these fly in the face of what the rest consider to be moral and normal On the other hand, there is an almost nostalgic longing for small-scale, national space, where morality, social solidarity, security and – especially – law and order are self-evident and where people are “true citizens” It is the national... attention be devoted to the claims of privacy in criminal procedure Arising partly at least from the fiction of the English policeman as a “citizen in uniform”, there was no discrete law of criminal procedure in the United Kingdom.11 In contrast to the civil law jurisdictions, there has never been 8 See for a comparison of pre-trial procedure in England and Wales and The Netherlands: Stewart Field et... discourse on the asylum problem, it is all too easy to forget that there are groups who actually help refugees for altruistic and/ or humanitarian reasons 10 Peter Alldridge and Chrisje Brants on the one hand, the limits of freedom of contract, where the parties make their own rules, and on the other the assertion of privacy in excluding the state, will take on growing importance as the criminal law is directed... persons and property What a discrete law of criminal procedure would acknowledge is that the role of the police sets them apart from the common run of humanity, and that a separate set of rules is appropriate The Netherlands, of course, does have a Code of Criminal Procedure (dating from 1926), which enumerates police powers to invade privacy and the conditions under which these may be used With the exception... from their own choices – with greater state intervention in the common law states This observation has been made with explicit reference to the United Kingdom and the Netherlands A second relevant distinction concerns conceptions of the relationship between the individual and the state, which is reflected in economic, social and legal arrangements Common law cultures proceed from the notion of the “state... establishing the value of privacy, its nature and significance as a moral right of autonomy, and the necessity of privacy rights entrenched in law that will allow the development of specifically recognised areas of autonomous space where the state cannot interfere Raes, on the other hand, takes both the value of autonomy in itself and the existence of privacy Introduction 9 rights in law as given and is more . PERSONAL AUTONOMY, THE PRIVATE SPHERE AND THE CRIMINAL LAW