In a judiciary process, in order to preserve your rights, if you have any responsibility in connection to an accident, most western countries’ constitutions recognize the right of citizens not to testify against themselves. This is of course very different from the idea of Annex 13, where we would gladly supply all useful data knowing that it is not supposed to be used against ourselves.
For years we aviation professionals have been candidly reporting our own and our organisations' errors and mistakes in an effort to help aviation safety…we have every right to stop doing that if the separation of both investigations is not clearly emphasized. The way this and some other recent investigations are carried out will pave the way for either:
I think you're living in a dream world if you imagine for a moment that anything you say or offer cannot and will not be used against you should the opportunity arise. It's for this reason that any operator for whom I've ever flown has instructed me not to discuss anything regarding a mishap, following the mishap. This includes my current employer, an international operator. We're not to talk to the media, to investigators, not even to the company until we've contacted our union representatives and obtained counsel from an attorney.
In the US, you can rest assured that anything you say to the FAA will most definitely be used against you.
Bear in mind that ICAO isn't regulatory. It's a convention. EASA/JAA is regulatory. The FAA is regulatory. CAA is regulatory. ICAO is not. It's more of a standard without teeth...the teeth being provided by each signatory.
The convention suggests that investigations must be carried out separately. Clearly a safety investigation, and a criminal investigation are visiting the same facts, same case, same circumstance, same evidence...but there's nothing to suppose that one should mutually exclude the other. If negligence is involved, then the fact that a safety investigation is in progress shouldn't hinder, nor prevent justice from taking it's course. And it won't. A safety investigation exists to gather facts related to the enhancement of safety...but facts regarding criminal acts, illegalities, and negligence or breach of duty during that investigation apply elsewhere, in the courts.
It's not unreasonable that one be responsible for one's acts, whether as a pilot or a bus driver. An excellent example would be the Comair crash in the USA, in Lexington, KY, a few years ago. Law suites flew everywhere, and even the sole surviving pilot sued and slugged it out in the courts.
It's unreasonable to presume that because aviation is involved or a mishap has occured, that prosecution and justice should be exempt. This is simply not the case. The trend internationally seems to be toward more and more criminal prosecution of pilots, with aircrew being held just as liable as any other operator. A bus driver that plows into a crowd on the sidewalk and kills ten people will probably go to trail. A pilot that takes off on the wrong runway, fails to properly configure or use a checklist, or do other acts of willful or inadvertant negligence is certainly not immune from prosecution of civil tort.