The Victims’ Directive and What Victims Want From Restorative Justice

Following fierce campaigning by victims’ groups, the European Commission has entered into a process of legislative and policy reforms with the aim of repositioning the victim in criminal proceedings. By November 2015, member states will need to have demonstrated that they have modified their domestic laws to give effect to the Directive 2012/29/EU establishing minimum standards on the rights, support, and protection of victims of crime. For the first time, restorative justice is explicitly regulated at EU legal level, as the Directive aims to establish a baseline for its safe implementation across member states. With this EU-wide policy backdrop and using original data, the article posits evidence-based recommendations for the implementation of the Directive. The research was carried out in 2013–14 as part of the “Restorative Justice in Europe” project co-financed by the European Commission. The research took place in the United Kingdom and combined desk research and qualitative research strategies with victims, while it triangulated its findings with follow-up surveys with offenders and professionals.     

One measure cannot trump it all: lessons from NATO’s early burden-sharing debates

This paper calls for a qualitative turn in discussing NATO burden-sharing. The paper takes issue with the numerical burden-sharing narrative in NATO and identifies its two main problems. Despite being simple, the 2% defence spending pledge lacks other basic attributes of any contributory system: fairness and effectiveness. Drawing from concepts of distributive justice, the paper analyses NATO’s first burden-sharing debates and demonstrates that due to their qualitatively different capabilities, the allies agreed on an egalitarian ability-to-pay distributive justice. Furthermore, it shows that the allies refrained from implementing fairness in terms of a one-size-fits-all formula, since this simple numerical approach could not produce fair and effective burden-sharing at the same time. Rather, they developed a dynamic framework for optimal sharing. These formative burden-sharing debates provide valuable lessons learned for the current build-up of NATO’s posture: less focused on formal sharing, more concerned with strategic outputs.     

Prevention,knowledge, justice: Robert Nozick and counterterrorism

ABSTRACT

This article explores questions of justice and moral permissibility of state action in counterterrorism through Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Using the case of the Berlin attack in December of 2016 and the ensuing political debate over whether potential terrorists could be put into preventive custody as an illustrative example, it engages Nozick’s argument on prevention, knowledge and justice. In Nozick’s fierce defence of individual rights, the state comes into being as an aggregate of individuals and their inviolable rights, and thus possesses no moral legitimacy of its own. Individual rights must therefore not be violated for the sake of common goods. In conjunction with his emphasis on free will and the ensuing unpredictability of human decision-making, the article highlights the Nozickian position as a powerful account against the justification of preventive custody, thereby providing a moral “fail-safe” in counterterrorism discourses that build on just war theory and utilitarianism.     

Adolescent Co-occurring Disorders Treatment: Clinicians' Attitudes,Values, and Knowledge

This study examined community-based clinicians’ (N = 294) attitudes, background/experiences, values, and knowledge relating to issues of co-occurring disorders, which occur at a high rate among adolescents involved in the juvenile justice system. Study results reveal that clinicians self-rate their clinical values and attitudes at or above the expected level of competency, but they concede that their skill and knowledge levels are not adequate. Comparison measures reveal that employment setting conditions, geographic region, hours worked per week, and strongly held convictions about the importance of integrated mental health and substance use disorders service delivery distinguish clinicians’ co-occurring disorders knowledge levels. Implications are offered.     

Local-level law enforcement: Muscovites and their uchastkovyy

The uchastkovyy, or beat officer, is at the front lines of Russian police work. This article investigates the general environment in which the uchastkovyy functions, using Moscow as an example. More specifically, this article examines the institutional structure within which the beat cop operates, his/her duties and resources, the quota system used to evaluate his/her performance, and the nature of the interaction between the uchastkovyy and the public. In so doing, the study disaggregates the monolith that is the Russian police, focusing on that component of the force (uchastkovyy) that interacts most directly with the citizenry. It relies on data from a survey of 1500 Muscovites and four focus group encounters organized by the author to elicit a broad range of public attitudes regarding the performance and conduct of uchastkovyy, exploring particularly what measures might be taken to enhance the level of public trust in their local beat officers.     

Looking beyond the economy: Pussy Riot and the Kremlin's voting coalition

The arrest of the protest punk band Pussy Riot (PR) in March 2012 and the subsequent prosecution of three band members pose a significant puzzle for political science. Although PR's performances presented a coherent alternative to the Putin regime's image of Russian reality, it was unlikely that the discordant music and crude lyrics of their art protest would inspire Russian society to take to the streets. Yet, the regime mounted a very visible prosecution against the three young women. We argue that the trial marked a shift in the Kremlin's strategy to shape state–society relations. In the face of declining economic conditions and social unrest, the PR trial encapsulated the Kremlin's renewed focus on three related mechanisms to insure social support: coercion, alliance building, and symbolic politics. The PR trial afforded the Kremlin an important opportunity to simultaneously redefine its loyal constituency, secure the Church–state relationship, and stigmatize the opposition.     

Justice Without Transition: Truth Commissions in the Context of Repressive Rule

While the study of transitional justice, and especially truth commissions, has gained in popularity over the past two decades, the literature is overwhelmingly focused on activities in democratizing states. This introduces a selection bias that interferes with proper analysis of causes and consequences of transitional justice on a global scale. In this paper, I discuss conditions under which new repressive elites, and even old repressive elites who survive to rule and repress in nominally new systems, may choose to launch broad investigations of the past. I argue that such a decision is based on two primary considerations, the presence of internally or externally based incentives (e.g., foreign aid) and the level of political control enjoyed by old elites in the new system. I apply this argument to post-Soviet Central Asia, including a detailed case study of Uzbekistan’s 1999 truth commission based on domestic media analysis and local elite interviews.

简论警察权益之保障——以公平正义为视角

警察权益遭受侵害的现象时有发生,不仅削弱了警察工作的积极性和主动性,也破坏了警民关系和和谐的社会秩序,背离了公平正义理念的诉求。因而,在全面了解警察权益遭侵害现状的基础上,以公平正义为视角,重新界定警察的角色和职能范围,完善相关的法律和保障制度,提高警察执法水平和人文素养,切实加强对警察权益的保护,就显得非常必要。     

法官能动性与公正再论

法院的判决宣示着法的精神,引导着民众的行为.诉诸于法院各种诉讼请求,即是将各种矛盾呈现在法官面前.法官必须判断何种诉求为正当,只有当案件事实符合法律规范的构成要件,且案件事实中蕴涵的法律价值和所适用的法律规范的价值取向相一致时,才可以依据该法律规范对案件事实作出判决.法官在运用国家的制定法以回应民众的要求时,将一些明显不当的有违民意的规定加以过滤,能动地对制定法加以填充修正.刘荣军教授亦言:"处于社会与国家立法机关之间的司法,应当以并不完整的法律作为基本的支撑,寻找制定法之外的法源,将社会的正义、公平的观念和价值导入司法程序之中,创造出能够解压、还原法律本意的规则,以作为裁判的依据."     

程序正义理论的再梳理:从《正义论》到《政治自由主义》——遵循罗尔斯思想发展的轨迹

在1971年出版的<正义论>里,罗尔斯将程序正义分为:完善的程序正义、不完善的程序正义、纯粹的程序正义;并认为:纯粹的程序正义决定了结果的实体正义.在学术界,罗尔斯的程序正义理论产生了涟漪:赞同观点和反对主张同时存在.作为自身学术思想的发展,在1993年出版的<政治自由主义>里,罗尔斯修订了其在<正义论>里的观点,认为:程序正义的正义性,部分依赖结果的实体正义性.学术思想的修正,并不代表罗尔斯对程序正义理论的放弃,而是加强了程序正义理论的现实实践基石.