The book co-edited and co-authored by Aleš Završnik (co-editor Alenka Šelih), analyses changes in criminal activities and crime control strategies in Central and Eastern Europe after the full-scale political, social, economic and legal changes over the past two decades. It explains the political background underlying these developments, and assesses their long-term social impact. Experts from Slovenia, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, the Czech Republic, Poland, Bosnia and Herzegovina discuss the politicization of crime, the on-going paradoxes regarding civil liberties, and the future of crime policy in comparative and country-specific terms. The book features trends of crime in transitional countries; politics, the media, and public perception of crime; surveillance; penal policy and political change; emerging trends including economic and organized crime, human trafficking and juvenile delinquency; and new perspectives on corruption in the region. It tells a story of the so called ‘other Europe’ where the narratives of freedom and human rights – the corner stones of the critique of the old socialist regimes – are being subverted by the ideas imported from the West itself. It shows how the ‘great transition’ – ushered in by foreign experts and advisers, and more or less eagerly welcomed by the people hungry for change – has brought in more, rather than less repressive penal policies. The book encourages readers to rethink a more fundamental issue, namely, the difference between democracy and totalitarianism.
COBISS.SI-ID: 1558606
To an ever-increasing extent, law enforcement agencies work with and rely on information obtained and passed to them by intelligence services. However, in comparison to the police, intelligent services face much less regulation or supervision. Contrasting levels of regulation and supervision pose a problem where the institutional and functional borders between intelligence and police agencies are increasingly blurred. For example: new "hybrid" police-intelligence institutions have sprung up; information is freely exchanged between police and intelligence organisations; and information gathered by intelligence agencies is used in criminal proceedings. But an impulsive blurring of organisational boundaries is not a solution to growing fears of terrorism and serious cross-border crime. Secret or sensitive information should be used in a way that balances the need for intelligence gathering with the right of the defence to examine incriminating evidence. The article presents the trend through the European Court of Human Rights case law and decisions of the constitutional Court of the Republic of Slovenia in which both courts decide about prerequisites of the "minimisation procedure" fashioned to prevent the "information laundering" in the control and security domain.
COBISS.SI-ID: 1626702
Technical forms of surveillance, enabled by developments in microelectronics, databases and computer networks, have increased the surveillance of our daily life. Communications in public telecommunication networks are tracked by mandatory data retention legislation, physical movement is monitored by video in public places, while bodily functions may be screened by devices such as security body-scanners. This allows agencies to accumulate, preserve and organise data much more efficiently, creating sensitive personal data databases and using tools such as "data mining" to combine and cross-reference information from formerly separate sources. The impact on fundamental liberties, especially equality and privacy, and on basic principles of democratic liberal societies, has consequently been profound. New surveillance technologies purport to be neutral, but it is necessary to analyse them from ethical, legal, human rights and criminological perspectives. For technology is inescapably political in its uses. By protecting environments characterised by social, political and economic inequalities it can reinforce the conditions already at work there, to the detriment of social equality, justice and social cohesion and by generating a new pre-emptive justice paradigm.
COBISS.SI-ID: 1588302
The paper analyses, compares and critically evaluates traffic surveillance and traffic critical infrastructure. It focuses on airports and road traffic with technologies such as video surveillance, road taxations, eCall initiative with the purpose to bring rapid assistance to motorists involved in a collision anywhere in the European Union. It shows increasing consumer surveillance with programmes of loyalty cards, smart card systems and RFID surveillance in recreation centres and amusement parks. The paper shows the legitimisations and rationale behind the surveillance systems, interests and motives of private surveillance subjects in the selected surveillance domains that also serve the interests of crime control.
COBISS.SI-ID: 12013137
While the general public has not called for changing laws to prevent and punish students who bully face-to-face, there have been many calls for the laws to change concerning cyberbullying in youth populations. There could be many reasons for this. Cyberspace does not recognize geographical boundaries yet the law has traditionally been based on these boundaries. Most laws were also tailored before the Internet’s widespread use and for the off-line environment, with tangible evidence being the centre of regulation of law enforcement agencies’ activities. This creates problems in applying the law to cyberbullying. There is also continuing tension between those who advise more regulation and control and those who believe that the Internet should remain censorship free. Many want to live in a “free world” in which not every annoyance is prohibited by criminal law. Although after the shootings at several high schools in the late 1990s in the U.S., and the subsequent reports that the perpetrators of these shootings had felt bullied by their peers, (Limber & Small, 2003) some U.S. states have already enacted legislation to make cyberbullying either a crime or at least a misdemeanour (Snakenborg, Van Acker, & Gable, 2011). But generally there is a reluctance to pass special laws to criminalise cyberbullying in most of the countries. Additionally, there is a debate whether we want to criminalise children or should cyberbullying be considered a disciplinary matter to be dealt with in schools using non-punitive approaches to educate our youth. Some researchers argue that educational measures may be the most effective way to respond to cyberbullying but may sometimes fail in preventing incidents as they lack the stronger deterrent effect of cyberbullying laws that prohibit and punish such behaviour (King, 2010).
COBISS.SI-ID: 1655630