Suchergebnisse

Green criminologists often deploy the notion of harm to capture patterns of environmental victimization sitting outside the narrow and legalistic confines of environmental "crime". In doing so, their analytical gaze is cast wide, resulting in a lack of focus on states and their specific obligations to protect citizens from such victimization. The current article addresses this by using the dialectic conception of state crime to direct criminological attention towards these obligations. Using its constituent elements of human rights, deviance and legitimacy, the article examines the state duty to protect environmental human rights, the importance of involving opposition groups in research on deviant state activity and the challenges faced by scholars attempting to evidence the illegitimacy of such practice. In doing so, the literature from state crime and green criminological scholarship is synthesized, resulting in a concept of state environmental crime that is of utility to both fields.

The author highlights the balancing act both on the regulatory as well as on the institutional level between state aid control and the liberalization of public services. He focuses on partially liberalized markets and tackling cross-subsidisation where Member States infringe the competitive neutrality of the privatisation process by various funding schemes. These are all subject to three criteria linked to the private investor test. Once partially liberalized, sectors traditionally shaped by public service obligations are prone to state intervention owing to the special needs they fulfil. Starting from the premise that the concept of universal services is designed to combine public policy objectives with a fully competitive market, the author allocates the role of state aid control as both a specific mandate avoiding selective distortions through the granting of state resources imputable to the State and as a regulatory mandate to maintain a level playing field for all undertakings in the Internal Market. The jurisprudence of Community Courts – e.g. UFEX, Chronopost and Laboratoires Boiron - is faced with the demarcation of the European Commission's powers and the determination of the nature and extent of judicial review. Its analysis focuses on cost calculation and allocation in search of crosssubsidisation of liberalised market segments by using state resources originally designed to compensate for public service obligations. He closes with the assumption that, because of the narrow confines of aleatory references made to the Courts, preference should be given to a best practice approach to cost allocation standards

This paper analyses the concept of state terrorism in relation to the politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The author uses the typology elaborated by the American political scientist Gus Martin. Iranian domestic and international patronage and assistance are researched. This paper comes to the conclusion that Iran is involved in a broad spectrum of terrorist activities; however, the specific forms of terrorism are carried our autonomously and in various time periods. The most active period was during the 1980s and the least Iranian terrorist activity can be noticed in the second half of 1990s.

Notwithstanding the universal prohibition against torture, and almost universal agreement that in order to qualify as torture, the act in question must be committed intentionally with an illicit purpose, the intentional element of torture remains ambiguous. I make the following claims about how we should interpret the intent requirement as applied to states. First, state intent should be understood objectively with reference to the apparent reasons for state action. The subjective motivation of particular state actors is not directly relevant. While we focus on subjective intent in the context of individual crime because of its relation to culpability and blameworthiness, in the context of state crime we should be concerned with preserving the legitimacy of political authority, and the conditions for legitimacy turn on the apparent reasons rather than subjective motivations behind state action. Second, the primacy of questions of legitimacy also makes irrelevant the distinction between specific and general intent. Instead, state-directed torture that is committed secretly and in a manner that removes it from public scrutiny should be regarded as quasi-criminal. Finally, the official interpretation of the Convention against Torture (CAT) adopted by the United States is flawed because it imposes a specific intent requirement that is not objective, and accords ambiguous weight to publicity. In doing so we make a double error: We treat state crimes as essentially the same as individual crime, and we fail to distinguish between the quasi-criminal and humanitarian functions of the CAT To identify a state act as torture, courts should ask whether alleged acts (which otherwise meet the actus reus of torture) appear to have been motivated by radical indifference to the suffering of the torture victim and the aim of stripping her and/or other members of the political community of their humanity. Only to the extent they seek to further establish the acts as "quasi-criminal" should courts ask whether the alleged acts were ...