Contribution to the study of the precautionary principle in criminal law and in criminal policy ; Contribution à l'étude du principe de précaution en droit pénal et en politique criminelle
The beginning of the 21st century has seen the implementation of profound legislative reforms which have upset the criminal law and the criminal policy. They took place in a society of risk characterized by the acceleration of the modernity and the production of multiform risks which are linked to it. Gradually the precautionary principle, taken forcibly from the environmental perspective and as an incantation and a refrain, will interfere in those matters to such an extent as to generate consequences on the principle of legality which structures the modern legal rationality, to impose the revision of some other key principles like the presumption of innocence and the principle of necessity, and to place at the center of decisions critical notions such as the danger. Under the influence of the precautionary principle, the very concepts of infraction, of legal responsibility and of punishment are being dislocated by the urgent appeal to take more and more into consideration the future and its potentiality of danger. In this perspective and under the growing pressure of the precautionary principle, the right to security tends to focalize upon a victimizing approach of the society at the expense of an old conception of criminal law founded upon the legal balance between security and liberty. And the criminal policy guiding those developments operate as a new model, which in its obsessional quest of security, makes of the precautionary principle both its internal and external finality. This thesis is thus devoted to the study of the precautionary principle as it is applied to the criminal law and to the criminal policy which it examines through theories and multidisciplinary approaches .Its main objective is, by the examination of the evolution of the criminal policy and of some theories of criminology, and in contact with the ideology of precaution, to highlight the current emergence of a new legal rationality of precaution which operates according to a specific methodology and by the use of a specific terminology. ...