Restrictions on criminal appeal in the EU and the US

In recent years, there has been a growing tendency in many legal systems including the US and several jurisdictions in Europe to limit, directly or indirectly, the possibilities of appeal. In order to relieve pressure from overburdening caseloads, criminal justice systems increasingly rely on plea bargaining and other alternative settlement procedures, which often require a limitation or a waiver of the right to appeal. The research assumption is that such limitations and waivers are predominantly based on an efficiency logic and that the far-reaching cost-benefit analysis may be detrimental to the underlying rationale of the right to appeal, namely the correction of wrongful decisions. The lack of thorough research in this field both in the US and the EU not only undermines the fairness of criminal trials at a national level, but also hampers the further development of fair trial safeguards and their respective constitutional human rights framework. The doctoral thesis aims to fill this gap in European legal research by eventually proposing a set of qualitative standards for the limitation and waiver of the right to appeal to ensure consistency in sentencing and protection against nontransparent settlements between the prosecutor and the defendant.