"Silence as Evidence” - Exploring the role of silence in evidence constructions at national and international criminal casesThis research project will focus on exploring and researching the ways, in which suspect’s silence in criminal cases is being used in evidence constructions.
The right to remain silent is one of the fundamental rights of an accused during criminal proceedings. Nevertheless, there is anecdotal evidence that the suspect's silence, or giving a non-plausible explanation, can be and is being used implicitly or explicitly by criminal judges in evidence construction and in sentencing. This reliance on suspect’s silence for both evidence construction and sentencing has been subject to heavy criticism. It undermines the suspect’s right to remain silent, and in practice leads to dubious convictions, as judges use their common sense to infer conclusions from the suspect’s silence, or from his/her implausible explanations. In addition, as the criminal law enforcement deals increasingly more with cross-border, international issues (foreign suspects, crimes committed elsewhere), subtle or not so subtle cultural differences between the judges and the suspect can further compromise accurate fact finding and cloud the evidence construction.
However, so far no research has systematically explored the reliance on silence in evidence construction in domestic, cross-border, and international cases. It is no clear how endemic the problem is, and how criminal judges actually use suspect’s silence in their argumentation and evidence construction in these different types of cases. It is also not evident under which conditions the silence of the suspect could be used legally and fairly. This project, therefore, aims at filling this gap and will conduct systematic, comparative, theoretical and empirical research into the use of silence in evidence constructions in national, cross-border, and international criminal judgments.
Tasks The PhD student will be asked to among other things:
- Develop an innovative research plan, combining legal doctrinal and empirical methodology to study the use of silence in evidence constructions across different types of cases
- Conduct legal theoretical, doctrinal, and legal empirical research on the use of silence in evidence constructions across different types of cases
- Publish and communicate research results to academics and practitioners in both Dutch and international criminal law practice
- Participate in education activities of the Department and teach master and bachelor law students, especially in the field of his/her own research expertise
- Contribute to other activities relevant to the PhD student of the Department of Criminal Law and Criminology and the NSCR