The right to a fair trial in criminal proceedings is one of the most basic constitutional rights. The way to achieve it is to ensure a “favourable neighbourhood” for this right i.e., constitutional law that recognises human rights, the tradition of judicial review, and a judicial system capable of scrutinising decisions of the Government. The last condition is specifically related to the capacity of a judicial system to review the prosecution’s discretionary decisions and to stay or dismiss the proceedings when necessary. In the United Kingdom, the doctrine is known as the “judicial stay of criminal proceedings and is justified by the concept of “abuse of process”. Israel “imported” the doctrine and has developed it in its own way. The prosecution’s power is among the most far-reaching powers of administrative authorities. The need to restrain it asked for a mechanism, set in legislation or in case law, which would balance the goal of efficient enforcement of law and order with the preservation of fundamental values, including fairness, equality, and due process, to prevent distortion of justice. It became necessary to allow a defendant to raise arguments justifying the request to stay the trial, such as: delay in the criminal justice process; breach of promise not to prosecute; loss or destruction of evidence; investigative impropriety; prosecution’s manipulative practices or misuse of process or power; selective and discriminatory enforcement; entrapment; prejudicial pre-trial publicity, etc. How do legal systems with limited and partial constitutional “tools” handle this essential principle of protecting fairness?
Keywords: criminal proceedings, constitutional law, judicial review, fairness, dismissal.
Baker, A. V. 2001. So Extraordinary, So Unprecedented an Authority: A Conceptual Reconsideration of the Singular Doctrine of Judicial Review. Duquesne Law Review, 39(4), pp. 729-768.
Barak, A. 2006. The Judge in a Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Barak-Erez, D. 1995. From an Unwritten to a Written Constitution: The Israeli Challenge in American Perspective. Columbia Human Rights Law Review, 26(2), pp. 309-256.
Bradley, A. W. & Pinelli, C. 2013. Parliamentarism. In: Michael Rosenfeld, M. & Sajó, A. (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Constitutional Law, pp. 650-652. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199578610.013.0032
L.-T. Choo, A. 2008. Abuse of Process and Judicial Stays of Criminal Proceedings. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford Monographs on Criminal Law and Justice. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199280834.001.0001
Curtis, M. 1997. The Government of Great Britain. In: Introduction to Comparative Government. 4th. ed. London: Pearson, pp. 48-89.
Dicey, A. V. 2013. The Law of the Constitution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Grimm, D. 2003. Types of Constitutions. In: Rosenfeld, M. & Sajó, A, (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Constitutional Law, pp. 102-131.
Halmai, G. 2013. The Use of Foreign Law in Constitutional Interpretation. In: Rosenfeld, M. & Sajó, A. (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Constitutional Law, pp. 1328-1348. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199578610.013.0066
Hunt, M. 1999. The Human Rights Act and Legal Culture: The Judiciary and the Legal Profession. Journal of Law & Society, 26(1), pp. 86-102. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-6478.00117
Leyland, P. 2016. The Constitution of the United Kingdom – A Contextual Analysis. 3rd ed. Bloomsbury: Bloomsbury Publishing. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781849469104
Llewellyn, K. N. 1960. The Common Law Tradition: Deciding Appeals. Boston: Little, Brown & Co.
Llewellyn, K. N. 2017. Jurisprudence – Realism in Theory and Practice. Transaction ed. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203787823
Lock, T. 2017. Human Rights Law in the UK After Brexit, Public Law, 2017 (supp. 1), pp. 117-134. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3046554
Misztal, B. A. 1996. Trust in Modern Societies. Cambrige: Polity Press.
Nakdimon, Y. 2021. Judicial Stays of Criminal Proceedings. 3rd ed. Nevo.
Pound, R. 1911. The Scope and Purpose of Sociological Jurisprudence, Harvard Law Review, 24(8), pp. 591-619. https://doi.org/10.2307/1324094
Shachar, Y. 1995. History and Sources of Israeli Law. In: Shapira, A. & DeWitt-Adar, K. (eds.), Introduction to the Law of Israel. The Hague.
Wells, C. 2017. Abuse of Process. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Young, D, Summers, M. & Corker, D. 2015. Abuse of Process in Criminal Proceedings. 4th ed. Bloomsbury: Bloomsbury Professional.
Young, J. 1999. The Politics of the Human Rights Act. Journal of Law & Society, 1999(26), pp. 27-37. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-6478.00113
Zamir, A. 2014. Truth v. Justice: Judicial Stay of Criminal Proceedings Due to Principles of Justice and Fairness – an Israeli Development to a British Rule. The Journal of Criminal Law, 78(6), pp. 511-522. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022018314557413