I explore the idiosyncrasies of Dutch policy with regard to prostitution, placing them in the broader framework of criminal justice and policy debates in general. More especially, I shall be looking at recent developments towards, on the one hand, legalization of prostitution, and on the other a crackdown by the (criminal justice) authorities on the organized criminal networks that would appear to have gained the upper hand in Amsterdam's red-light district.

1 Taiwan, part of mainland China until the end of the 1940s, is difficult to place in any one legal tradition. The structure of its criminal process, however, is recognisable as a mixture of adversarial and inquisitorial (see Section 4).

Citation: Field, Stewart and Brants, Chrisje (2016) Truth-finding, procedural traditions and cultural trust in the Netherlands and England and Wales: when strengths become weaknesses. The International Journal of Evidence & Proof, 20 (4 Northumbria University has developed Northumbria Research Link (NRL) to enable users to access the University's research output. Copyright © and moral rights for items on NRL are retained by the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. Single copies of full items can be reproduced, displayed or performed, and given to third parties in any format or medium for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge, provided the authors, title and full bibliographic details are given, as well as a hyperlink and/or URL to the original metadata page. The content must not be changed in any way. Full items must not be sold commercially in any format or medium without formal permission of the copyright holder. The full policy is available online: http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/policies.html This document may differ from the final, published version of the research and has been made available online in accordance with publisher policies. To read and/or cite from the published version of the research, please visit the publisher's website (a subscription may be required.) vision. This suggests that information is filtered through an established lens. Where we have a pre-existing view about the facts (for example a suspect's guilt) we do not deal symmetrically with subsequent information. We tend to seek to confirm our pre-existing hypothesis and have difficulty in 'seeing' -or seeing the significance of -facts pointing to alternative explanations (Brants 2013: 163-6). This has been a key factor in the story behind miscarriages of justice in many jurisdictions.While there are clearly many similarities in the particular underlying causes of wrongful convictions and in general psychological effects in play, a comparative study focussed on procedural traditions can nevertheless be fruitful. Jurisdictions from the adversarial and inquisitorial traditions differ significantly in the guarantees that each offers against wrongful conviction in terms of expectations in professional conduct, in ways of assessing and responding to potentially misleading and problematic evidence, and thus also in the definition of the roles and relationships of professional actors. These key differences are linked to different underlying theories as to how facts and truth are to be found.Sometimes these concepts of truth-finding -or at least elements of them -are explicitly stated in policy documents and legislation. 1 But often they are set out, if at all, only in fragmented or incomplete terms and have to be at least partly constructed by identifying the underlying assumptions of the particular procedural tradition.For jurisdictions primarily influenced by the inquisitorial tradition, the emphasis has been on the active truth-finding judge and the dossier.Thus ...

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