2122 Inclusion and Exclusion in the Penal Domain
Room: C4.08
Chair: Letizia Mancini | University of Milan - Italy (to be confirmed)
Letizia Mancini | University of Milan - Italy
Protecting vulnerable subjects and\or increasing social exclusion? Some remarks on the use of ‘culture’ in penal law in European societies
Abstract
Female genital mutilation (introduced as a specific crime in several european penal codes), manghel (bagging) or burqa dressing represent, despite their diversity, practices that criminal law (substantive and / or procedural) defines as ‘cultural’ and incompatible with fundamental principles and rights of European legal culture. Starting from these cases, the report proposes some considerations on the implications and consequences of cultural conflict 'management' through the criminal law instrument. If, on the one hand, the use of criminal law is motivated on the basis of the violation of fundamental rights that these practices produce, on the other hand the criminalization of these practices often determines the criminalization of entire groups, too, overlapping the former with the latter, in a process of essentialization and cultural trivialization that, consciously or not, contributes to exacerbating differences and perpetuating processes of marginalization and separation.
Barbara Smith | Hartwick College
Public perceptions about the sex offender registry website and community protection policies
Abstract
Literature reflects the perception that sex offenses are serious and a threat to the community. The purpose of this study is to examine both the residents' perceived threat of victimization and attitudes towards community protection policies after visiting the sex offender registry website. Additionally, reasons why individuals have not visited the sex offender website are examined. Date were obtained from a sample of 200 residents from a small community outside of a large northeaster city in the United States. This research provides insight to further examine community members' perception of sex offender laws and registration.
Lucero Ibarra Rojas | CIDE
Elena Alejandra Ibarra | UMSNH
Mariana A. Manzo | Universidad Nacional de Córdoba
Law, rights and political mobilization, without justice? The case studie of “gender violence alert” in México
Abstract
This paper aims at promoting discussion over the challenges of political mobilization of feminist social movement and NGOs that play a key role in promoting a public debate of feminicide in México. We look particularly at the desing of a legal instrument called “Gender Violence Alert”, which plays in a unfavorable institutional context of structural violence in state and no/state arenas. The gender violence alert brings a human rights framework of reference stress the territorial prevention of violence against women. Despite of the mobilization of law, the creation of new legal frameworks and political mobilization, violence against women in México has increased. This paper question wether a new epistemic of feminist justice is possible by using the gender violence alert legal instrument in the state and non/state arenas. This qualitative study is based on participant observation and in-depth interviews with members of feminist organisations that have requested the alert. The analysis of the transformation of law, rights and politics mobilized through the alert can collaborate in the comprehension of the complex relations between feminist movements and their emancipatory demands through law.
Javier Cigüela Sola | UAO / UOC
Citizenship and Criminal Law in a Globalized World
Abstract
Criminal scholars have been characterizing the legal subject in various ways, of which two would remain currently in conflict: those who maintain that the criminal law is addressed to persons, understood as those over 18 who meet certain moral/mental capacities, enough to be considered guilty; and those who maintain that properly the penal norms are addressed to citizens, understood as those persons (capable adults) to whom the State is united by some kind of political bond. The second characterization, visible in very diverse authors such as Duff, Pettit, Kindhäuser, K. Günther or M. Pawlik, has contributed to a certain politization of the concept of criminal culpability: suddenly, it seems that punishment not only requires a subject bearing certain internal capacities according to law, but it is also required a political bond –the citizenship– between the punished and the State itself that would work as a "second moment" or "political moment" of the justification of the ius puniendi. The purpose of the present proposal is to consider the implications of this new legitimation framework in relation to the punishment of those who have been excluded, formally or materially, from that political link that we call citizenship: (i) either because, despite living in the punishing State, they suffer situations of discrimination, marginalization or denial of citizenship rights (such as the social excluded or the immigrants without the right to vote), (ii) or because there is no political link between the State itself and the person who would have committed the crime (as is the case with the “transnational drug courier” cases). The objective is to analyze if the inexistence or weakening of this link should lead to a lower responsibility for the crime, as it would be logically concluded if we consider certain proposals such as K. Gunther’s or A. Duff’s. In addition, I will defend the need for a global citizenship framework, capable of responding to the fact that the economic and social dynamics of late capitalism are global too (as for example drug production and consuming, to refer to the latter case), which implies that our reciprocal responsibility as citizens can not be confined to national territories but has to go further and beyond the states themselves.