Concerning criminal procedure, this book takes a closer look at the interaction between converging tendencies and legal culture and tradition. It does so by studying the development of criminal procedure in the Netherlands and England and Wales. I have selected England because it is the birthplace of the adversarial tradition and therefore the most obvious place in Europe to look at if one wants to know how that tradition has fared in recent times. The inquisitorial tradition is represented by the Netherlands. The Dutch system has historically been a clear and strong exponent of the inquisitorial tradition, and it also the jurisdiction that is most accessible to me: the language is my mother tongue, and having grown up there and having been trained as a Dutch lawyer also means that I know the legal culture intimately. The present research covers the development of the procedural systems in both jurisdictions between the 1960s and 2010. Procedural systems change constantly, and convergent tendencies are by no means a new phenomenon. But the developments after the second World War are of particular significance for the theme of convergence and tradition. The 60s mark the beginning of the influence of the ECHR, the expansion of the welfare state featuring active state intervention in and regulation of society, the general emancipation of citizens, and the emergent focus on individual rights and liberties. I have ended the research coverage in the year 2010 for practical reasons: it is recent enough to include the latest major reform projects in both jurisdictions, while it is also sufficiently long ago to allow the fundamental impact of those reforms to be assessed. As a consequence, this book does not intend to give an overview of Dutch and English criminal procedure as it stands today; while I have described the most recent state of the law wherever possible and relevant, the book is best approached as a historical work that takes a close, analytical look at one particularly interesting period of the recent ...