The Evolution of Criminal Law in Continental Western Europe

Abstract

Through the ages societies have been confronted with criminal behavior. Whenever an act was committed that that harmed an individual or threatened the whole community, the legal system had to be restored one way or another. In the course of history all sorts of methods and measures have been introduced to deal with persons who had infringed private interests or endangered the common safety. Studying the evolution of criminal law in Western Europe, from its early stages to its present form, some main features can be distinguished. One of these features is the gradual shift of criminal procedure from the private domain to the public domain. At first, there was not much public interference with criminal behavior whatsoever. For the greater part, it was up to the victim of the offence, or the family he belonged to, to take legal action against the offender. Only gradually the authorities began to consider criminal justice a matter of public interest. In the Middle Ages, judicial officials were appointed who had to bring each and every culprit to justice. They had to ensure that they were punished properly by the courts of law. To do so, the judges had a wide range of penalties at their disposal, including various species of the death penalty and other forms of corporal punishment. Meanwhile, the criminal liability of a person who had to stand trial changed drastically. No longer was an offender criminally liable for the sole reason that he had committed an unlawful act, like before, but also because he was to be blamed for having done so. When the Middle Ages came to their end, some new theories about punishment were introduced, aiming at the exclusion of wrongdoers from society by depriving them from their freedom. This new penal policy was gaining ground rapidly and would eventually lead to the introduction of various prison systems in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In that same period, ancient sources of criminal law, such as customary law, divine law and revived Roman law, lost their legal power and made way for statute law. As a result of this rise of legislation various voluminous criminal codes were issued at the end of the eighteenth century. In the course of the twentieth century most of the penal practices in Western Europe were significantly transformed. This transformation had a lot to do with the notion that one should reform the moral standards of wrongdoers, in order to prevent them from making the same mistakes again.