International Criminal Law Review

Each article examines how multiple legal systems address the same underlying problem, typically drawing on primary legislation, case law from the European Court of Human Rights and national constitutional courts, treaty instruments, and published empirical data. The editorial perspective is comparative rather than prescriptive: the aim is to document how legal systems diverge and where they converge, not to argue that one approach is correct.

Featured Topics

Cybercrime and Digital Law

How do legal systems define and prosecute offenses that exist only because of networked technology? These articles cover the Budapest Convention framework and its EU implementation, the criminalization of data protection violations under GDPR, admissibility standards for digital forensic evidence, platform liability for defamatory speech, and the unresolved question of who bears criminal responsibility when an autonomous system causes harm.

Selected articles: - Cybercrime Legislation Across EU Jurisdictions: one legal floor, four different penalty regimes - Digital Evidence Standards in Criminal Proceedings: chain of custody and the Daubert problem - Artificial Intelligence and Criminal Accountability: when no human pulled the trigger

Comparative Criminal Justice

Five articles on the foundational mechanics of criminal liability, plea resolution, victim recovery, and post-conviction remedies. The organizing question is whether criminal law's response to the same harmful conduct should differ depending on whether the system classifying it is common-law or civil-law in origin, and how much it actually does differ in practice.

Selected articles: - Comparative Negligence: Criminal Versus Civil: why the same fatal mistake is a crime in one system and a lawsuit in another - Plea Bargaining: Adoption and Resistance Internationally: how a distinctly American practice became a global norm - Wrongful Conviction Remedies Across Jurisdictions: reopening a final verdict is only half the fight

Human Rights and Criminal Procedure

The European Convention on Human Rights sets procedural floors that Strasbourg enforces against signatory states, but how those floors interact with domestic procedural traditions varies sharply. These articles trace fair-trial doctrine, pretrial detention limits, police oversight mechanisms, mutual-recognition instruments for cross-border cooperation, and the contested question of when a state's criminal justice system should treat a young person as something other than a small adult.

Selected articles: - Fair Trial Standards Under Article 6 ECHR: the rights the treaty never actually names - Pretrial Detention Limits in Democratic Systems: what five systems allow, and what Strasbourg requires - Juvenile Justice and Youth Criminal Responsibility: how five legal systems draw the line

Legal Reform and Policy

Criminal codes age. Some jurisdictions replace them wholesale; others amend the same text for over a century; others draft model codes that legislatures adopt voluntarily. These articles cover codification movements, the six distinct tracks along which European states are decriminalizing conduct, the four competing models for holding corporations criminally liable, sentencing reform and the proportionality principle, and statutes of limitations as a contested boundary between the state's prosecutorial power and the defendant's interest in finality.

Selected articles: - Criminal Law Codification Movements: why Italy still runs on a 1930 penal code - Corporate Criminal Liability: four models for deciding where corporate blame lives - Statutes of Limitations: A Comparative Perspective: how six legal systems decide when it is too late to prosecute