Currently, much consideration is being given to the reform of the laws relating to the control of corruption. On the international and intergovernmental plane, the European Union, the Council of Europe and the Organisation of Economic Go-operation and Development are seeking to agree minimum standards for the conduct of inter-state commerce.(1) The General Assembly of the United Nations has recently resolved that more effective action against corruption be taken by Member States and has annexed to the resolution an international code of conduct for public officials.(2) In the United Kingdom, the Nolan Committee on Standards in Public Life, in its first report,(3) recommended that the Government should review the law of bribery and corruption and, as a consequence, we now have a recently published Law Commission consultation paper which reviews the current law and makes radical proposals for its reform.(4) Subsequently to the publication of the Law Commission paper, the Home Office published a discussion paper indicating a commitment in principle to consolidating and reforming the laws on corruption.(5) On this occasion at least we may assume that Law Commission proposals will be subjected to constructive scrutiny by the Home Office. There may be a prospect that some of its recommendations will survive this process and ultimately find their way into the statute book.

Parliament and the courts have been marching in step to extend the ambit of the criminal law to reach transnational and extraterritorial conduct. The several, if uncoordinated, developments have all pushed in the same direction on the basis of the same general policy, that it is necessary that criminal jurisdiction be amended to meet the increasingly international aspects of harmful conduct. It is, therefore, much against the trend to find an English court deciding that it did not have jurisdiction over the conduct of persons it described as "thoroughly dishonest rascals", when some of that conduct took place in England. Yet this was the conclusion the Court of Appeal reached in Atakpu. It will be argued that the outcome was unwarranted and was based on a misconception of the territorial basis of the criminal law.

This article discusses two issues concerning the taking of intoxicants and the availability of a defence of diminished responsibility. First it examines the position of persons addicted to the intoxicant and critically analyses the current basis on which any resulting intoxication may be regarded as a condition substantially impairing responsibility within section 2 of the Homicide Act 1957. Next it examines how, for nonaddicted persons, the taking of intoxicants may lead to the failure of a defence of diminished responsibility that, absent intoxicants, may have succeeded on the basis of other factors inherent to the accused.

A court may be confronted by a lack of temporal coincidence between actus reus and mens rea but nonetheless impose liability because on analysis the coincidence requirement is held to be satisfied in form or in substance. The situation may arise in two ways. There may, as in R. v. Miller,1 be initial blameless causal responsibility followed by a culpable failure to avert or mitigate the consequences of the initial conduct. Or, as in R. v. Le Brun,2 there may be conduct with the mens rea required for the offence charged, but to no relevant causal effect, followed by a non-culpable causing of the actus reus of the offence. It will be contended that in these two categories of case blameless causal agency is apt to play too prominent a role in the imposition of liability for what may be very serious offences.

This article is focused on the decision in Berry (No. 2), where the Court of Appeal refused to relist the applicant's appeal following a successful prosecution appeal to the House of Lords, notwithstanding that two arguable grounds of appeal previously heard by the Court of Appeal remained outstanding. The case raises important issues concerning the nature of the Court of Appeal's relisting jurisdiction and the compatibility of the decision with protections for defendants provided by the European Convention on Human Rights.