Proportionality in the philosophy of punishment: From “why punish?” to “how much?”

This article is a substantially revised version of a paper originally prepared for the International Conference on Justice in Punishment, Jerusalem, Israel, March 27–31, 1988.     

Police observation and the 1990 schengen convention

Conclusion In spite of the different conditions, all of the five countries which originally signed the Schengen Convention seem to allow and use observation as a method of criminal inquiry, at least to a certain extent. However, the only country in which practically every type of observation is based on statutory provisions is Germany. The interpretation that the Constitutional Court has given to the privacy and the freedom of the individual has led to the situation that Germany now has an extremely detailed and vast system of legislation on breaches of privacy by the state in general and on observation in particular. One could therefore think that the reason for the existence of this German legislation is a typically German one. But is this really true?The creation of an explicit legislation on police observation powers would also bring more clarity into the undefined terminology used in the Schengen Convention and clarify the legal position and situation in which observing police officers might find themselves (in their own country as well as abroad). Furthermore, it would go some way to controlling the activities of the police in the highly sensitive field between the common interest of criminal investigation and the individual interest of privacy. It leads one to seriously wonder if the use of intensive observation techniques by the police without a statutory basis is in accordance with the right to privacy as guaranteed by article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights ...This article is based on a contribution to the 11th International Congress on Criminology, held August 22–27, 1993 in Budapest (Hungary). It was written with financial support of the Legal Research Foundation, which is part of the Netherlands Foundation for Scientific Research (NWO), and of the Dutch Ministry of Internal Affairs. The author would like to thank Chantal Joubert, especially for providing him with information on Luxembourg and France, Prof. dr. Jan Naeyé for his commentary on a previous version of the article and Frank Klaassen for his very special contribution to the presentation in Budapest.     

Democracy and the Symbolic Constitution of Society

Building on Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms, this paper argues that the continuities and discontinuities characterizing the passage from medieval politics to modern democracy can best be understood by reference to political power's symbolic structure. For the one, political power, whether theocratic or democratic, always mediates an absolute power; as mediation, political power enacts the twofold movement which Cassirer has identified as characteristic of all human symbolization: a distancing of, and approximation to, reality. For the other, democracy institutionalizes a category distinction between meaning and being, making of political unity a functional, rather than substantial, unity.     

Dating of ballpoint pen ink

In this paper we describe a case in which a cash book, dated of the year 2000, was sent to the Forensic Science Division, Document Laboratory, Zurich Canton Police in March 2003. The questioned document was a list of 29 pages containing a consecutive handwritten numbering and dated entries (payments) made of blue ballpoint pen ink. By definition, a cash book has to be written by hand and the entries have to be made daily. The questioned document was suspected to have been written within a short period (e.g., a few hours) and backdated. The document lab was asked to determine the date of the entries of the questioned list. On one hand, we were asked, if the cash book had been kept on account consecutively during the period of one year, and on the other hand, the judges were interested in knowing, if the document could have been written in 2003 and back dated to 2000. To answer these questions, the document was examined for latent elements by electrostatic detection device (ESDA). The relative dating of the entries was performed by the quantification of the ballpoint pen ink dyes and their degradation products using HPLC. Results show that it is possible to determine the relative age of entries written by ballpoint pen within a relatively short time scale, if storage and supporting material of the different samples are the same or at least similar.     

Artenschutz in der Fachplanung

Die Verbote des Artenschutzes führten bisher eher ein unbeachtetes Dasein. Erst die Diskussion um die Gebiete des europäischen kohärenten Netzes Natura 2000, bestehen aus Europäischen Vogelschutzgebieten auf Grund der Vogelschutz-Richtlinie (V-RL) und Gebieten von gemeinschaftlicher Bedeutung auf Grund der Fauna- Flora-Habitat-Richtlinie (FFH-RL) hat auch den in diesen Richtlinien verankerten Artenschutz ins Bewusstsein der Planer und Entscheider treten lassen. V-RL und FFH-RL bestehen im Wesentlichen aus 2 Teilen, einem Teil über den Schutz von Flächen und einem Teil über den Schutz von Arten. Während sich der Flächenschutz auf ausgewählte Bereiche beschränkt, gilt der Artenschutz flächendeckend in allen Mitliedgliedstaaten. 1) Der Verfasser ist Leiter des Referats Rechtsangelegenheiten des Naturschutzes im Niedersächsischen Umweltministerium, Lehrbeauftragter für Umwelt- und Planungsrecht an der Technischen Universität Braunschweig (Institut für Geoökologie) und der Universität Hannover (Institut für Landschaftspflege und Naturschutz), sowie Mitglied des Deutschen Rats für Landespflege. Der Beitrag gibt seine persönliche Auffassung wieder.Der Aufsatz basiert auf dem Vortrag, den der Verfasser auf den Speyerer Planungsrechtstagen vom 10. bis 12. 3. 2004 gehalten hat.

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