Pipe-Dreams of Truth and Fairness: Is Crawford v. Washington a Breakthrough for Sixth Amendment Confrontation Rights?

Abstract

In the process of constitutionalizing criminal procedure, Europe lags far behind the developments that revolutionized the U.S. legal system in the 1960s and 1970s. While that process in the U.S., as is generally known, has been in decline ever since the mid-1980s, the pendulum in Europe started, if slowly, to swing upward just around that time. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, when constitutional criminal procedure in the U.S. appears, at best, to enjoy endangered species status in light of overbearing national security concerns, the Strasbourg European Court of Human Rights continues to sharpen the teeth of basic defense rights as guaranteed—in particular— by the fair trial provisions of art. 6 of the European Convention of Human Rights and Basic Freedoms (in the following, European Convention). Certainly, it would be naive to think that security concerns could not—or are at least not likely to—present a threat to liberty rights in Europe to the extent seen in the U.S. Still, within the