The book co-edited and co-authored by Aleš Završnik (co-editor Alenka Šelih), analyzes 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 ongoing 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. But intelligence services work with much greater freedom than the police from regulation or supervision. The institutional and functional borders between intelligence and police agencies were never designed so as to block completely the flow of information between the two fields, but the trends identified in this paper suggest a movement in quite the opposite direction that threatens fundamental liberties. New “hybrid” police-intelligence institutions have sprung up; information is freely exchanged between police and intelligence organisations; information gathered by intelligence agencies is used in criminal proceedings. But an impulsive blurring of organisational and functional 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 which 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" between the actors in the control and security domain.
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 functiŽons 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-referenceinformation 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