Suchergebnisse

Afghanistan faces significant challenges as it seeks to emerge from thirty years of civil war and insurgent violence and promote lasting peace and security. Terrorist incidents, which have increased dramatically since 2004, continue to pose a major threat to security, destabilizing governance and fracturing state initiatives to guarantee rule of law to citizens. An urgent priority for the government, as part of its development of counterterrorism policy, is to ensure that the formal criminal justice system responds effectively to the threat of terrorism by creating mechanisms and procedures that support the rights and needs of victims in accordance with international human rights standards. To date, examining victimhood in Afghanistan and accurately understanding the assistance and support that victims of terrorism receive and to which they are entitled during criminal justice processes have avoided academic scrutiny. Informed by empirical evidence and qualitative interviews with justice officials in Afghanistan, this article aims to fill this important gap in scholarship. It does so by drawing on an international framework for good practices outlined in the Global Counterterrorism Forum's Madrid Memorandum to shed new light on gaps in existing national law. In doing so, it makes important recommendations for both institutional and legislative reform designed to strengthen protections and assistance for victims of terrorism and inform contemporary reviews of criminal procedural law being undertaken by justice ministries in Afghanistan.

The criminal law frameworks of countries that have been the subject of interna- tional peacekeeping operations and military interventions often reveal an urgent requirement for reform. The promotion of fair and effective justice systems, the rule of law and transition from conflict to peace frequently necessitates the intro- duction of new state legislation. Legal transplants have been employed as a legisla- tive tool to bring about post-conflict legal change. However, the use of transplanted law in these situations has been controversial and has raised concerns about the jus- tification for adopting it. This paper examines the justification for employing legal transplants to develop new post-conflict criminal laws by assessing their practical utility and the motivational rationale for employing them. It reviews theoretical perspectives on transplant feasibility and reflects on the experience of previous criminal law legal transplants. The article concludes by proposing an evaluative test for prior application to post-conflict criminal legal transplants to assess their prospects of success and to gauge the necessity for later change and adaptation.

One of the most important legacies of the "Troubles" in Northern Ireland and the ensuing 20 years post-peace-process era, heralded by the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, is the rise of complex and diverse Republican and Loyalist paramilitary groups engaging in acts of terrorism and a wide range of organized criminal and cross-border activities. Yet, little scholarship has been dedicated for examining the nexus between terrorism and organized crime in Northern Ireland or for accurately understanding the role that paramilitaries play in organized crime and their dynamic interactions with organized criminal groups. Informed by empirical evidence and qualitative interviews with government agencies in Northern Ireland, it is this important gap in scholarship that this article aims to fill. It does so by developing a new terrorism-organized crime model which reveals a range of different types of crime-terror interactions in Northern Ireland. The article concludes that national terrorism-organized crime models, and the Northern Ireland model in particular, albeit with variations to its constituent components to accommodate local situations, are most appropriate for capturing intricate and dynamic interactions between these two phenomena across diverse environments rather than existing models designed for universal application.