The Acquisition of Legal Status by Individuals in Transnational Criminal Proceedings in Europe

Abstract

Sabine Gless highlights the individual’s journey from an object of government caprice, susceptible to arrest on a foreign warrant without legal protection, to a legally protected defendant in the frameworks of transnational criminal law. Using in particular Germany and Switzerland as examples of different approaches taken in Continental Europe, she maps the evolution of defendants’ rights from domestic criminal justice to European Human Rights from the 19th to the 21st century, and the slow shift from a state-centred understanding of transnational criminal law to the acknowledgment of individual rights under a human rights narrative.