Pre-Trial Judicial Control in The Common Law Tradition: Functional Equivalents of The Investigating Judge and Lessons for Uzbekistan

This article offers a comparative legal analysis of pre-trial judicial control in England and Wales, the United States and Canada. It examines how the common law, which has no investigating judge in the continental sense, secures judicial oversight of interferences with personal liberty and privacy, and what lessons this experience holds for the investigating judge introduced in Uzbekistan in 2025. Drawing on functional comparison and case-law analysis, the study shows that magistrates, federal magistrate judges and examining justices perform no investigative function and are confined to authorising and reviewing coercive measures. Pre-trial control in this tradition rests on the combination of two mechanisms: prior judicial authorisation (ex ante) and the subsequent exclusion of unlawfully obtained evidence (ex post). The article argues that the Uzbek investigating judge, despite its continental name, is functionally a “judicial control judge”, and that the approval of nearly 95 per cent of detention requests points to a risk of “legal translation”, whereby a transplanted institution is reshaped by the earlier practice of prosecutorial sanction. Specific amendments to the Criminal Procedure Code of Uzbekistan are proposed.