Crime-Reduction Effects of Open-street CCTV: Conditionality Considerations

This study addresses the conditional nature of the effectiveness of open-street CCTV (closed circuit television) by examining the differences in the effects (1) between daytime and nighttime crime, (2) between weekday and weekend crime, (3) across specific-crime offenses, and (4) depending on CCTV site characteristics, including location type (e.g. downtown, business district, school/university, or residential area) and the site’s base rate of crime. This study used HLM (hierarchical linear modeling) with 84 repeated measures across 34 camera locations in Cincinnati, Ohio, while also accounting for overlapping camera areas. Overall, the findings provided minimal evidence of the effectiveness of CCTV in reducing crime, though some types of crime were reduced in residential areas especially, and effectiveness was clearly interdependent with an area’s base rate of crime. Finally, WDQ analyses showed that diffusion of benefits occurred much more often than displacement in cases where there was a crime reduction, post-CCTV.     

Conditionality and Enlargement in Light of EU Constitutional Developments

Abstract: Conditionality has deeply affected European integration, particularly in what concerns EU human rights external policy on the one hand, and the enlargement process on the other hand. This paper affords a picture of the problems which conditionality has raised, not only on legal grounds, but also for the shaping and the understanding of the European identity. Moreover, the paper investigates how recent EU developments, such as the further stages of the enlargement process and the ‘Treaty establishing a European Constitution’, might change the course of, and might be affected by, conditionality.     

Ironies in Human Rights Protection in the EU: Pre-Accession Conditionality and Post-Accession Conundrums

In the wake of the extensive scrutiny of the human rights credentials of the new Member States under the EU pre-accession conditionality, which itself was riddled with paradoxes, this article considers a rather unexpected irony thrown up by the accession of these countries. It is that the post-communist constitutional courts, which have been applauded for vigorous protection of fundamental rights after the fall of the Communist regime that was marked by nihilism to rights, have come rather close to having to downgrade the protection standards after accession, due to the new constraints of supremacy of EC law. The article will consider the sugar market cases of the Hungarian and Czech Constitutional Courts and of the Estonian Supreme Court, which appear to add weight to the concerns that have been voiced in some older Member States about the fundamental rights protection in the EU. Indeed such concerns were recently also addressed in the concurring opinions to the Bosphorus judgment of the European Court of Human Rights.