CRIMINAL LAW attracts the attention of the public and the legislator more than any other area of law, President Mary McAleese told a conference on criminal law yesterday. She was opening the 22nd conference of the International Society for the Reform of Criminal Law in Dublin.
The content of our criminal law makes a very particular statement about the society in which we live, Mrs McAleese said.
"It opens windows on human nature that many of us would prefer not to look through, windows on the behaviour of individuals, of systems, of subcultures, of societies.
Referring to the theme of the conference, Codifying the Criminal Law, she said that Irish criminal law, like Topsy, "just growed", "giving us a relatively unscientific hotch potch of case law and statutes, some ancient, some new.
"It might be just about penetrable to law students and lawyers, but its scattered and fragmented nature presents real issues in terms of the wider societal accessibility of the law. It does, however, have about it a certain wisdom distilled over many long generations of trial and error and so the absorption of the best it has to offer into a new code is a tough agenda."
The conference has been organised by the Irish Criminal Code Team at UCD and the Department of Justice, and continues over the weekend and into next week, ending on Tuesday. The Chief Justice, Mr Justice John Murray, is honorary chairman of the conference. Introducing the first plenary session of the conference the secretary general of the Department of Justice, Seán Aylward, said that though he strongly supported the codification project, he had been a "serial on-the-hoof lawmaker" himself.
"I rather enjoyed the moral panic which was followed by putting ink on new legislation though afterwards there can be a bit of a hangover," he said. He recalled having had to prepare a complex piece of extradition law within a 24-hour period.
The conference brings together delegates and speakers from Ireland the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, South Africa and Europe. Topics include the Irish codification initiative, differing approaches to codification in the common law tradition; the constitutional framework of codification; codifying the general principles of criminal liability and various defences, and will examine in particular the codification of the law on homicide and sexual offences.
The conference comes as a major project on the codification of Irish criminal law has begun under the chairmanship of Prof Finbar McAuley in UCD, the Irish Criminal Law Codification Project.
Other Irish speakers include former minister for justice Michael McDowell SC; the Director of Public Prosecutions, James Hamilton; Mr Justice Paul Carney; Prof Tom O'Malley, from NUI Galway; Lia O'Hegarty, a member of the Human Rights Commission; and Fr Peter McVerry.