Confrontation and the Criminal Defendant in a Hybrid Legal System: The Republic of North Macedonia

This note analyzes the treatment of out-of-court statements in the Republic of North Macedonia’s (NMK) hybrid criminal procedure system, which blends adversarial and neoinquisitorial elements. Anchored in the principle of orality, NMK’s Criminal Procedure Law (CPL) generally prohibits the use of out-of-court statements against criminal defendants with four narrow exceptions. The article compares each exception with the approaches taken under U.S. constitutional and evidentiary law and the European Court of Human Rights jurisprudence. While three exceptions—preserved testimony, impeachment of testifying witnesses, and statements from threatened witnesses—are consistent with U.S. and European standards, the admission of statements given to prosecutors by unavailable witnesses is clearly impermissible under U.S. law and problematic under the European Convention on Human Rights. The analysis illustrates the tension between adversarial safeguards and continental evidentiary flexibility, raising concerns about fairness and the right of confrontation in evolving legal systems.