Violencia sexual contra las mujeres (Tema Central)

La violencia sexual contra las mujeres tiene diferentes manifestaciones, todas ellas constituyen una violación de sus derechos humanos, conforme lo determina el Estatuto de Roma y la jurisprudencia internacional. En América Latina, la violencia sexual contra las mujeres ha sido una de las formas de represión desde el Estado, en las situaciones de conflicto armado, pero también es parte de la cotidianidad de las mujeres, el riesgo de ser violadas es una realidad con la que deben convivir.

Estudio de los aspectos teórico-prácticos del delito de trata de personas con fines de explotación sexual y su prueba en el proceso penal acusatorio (Tema Central)

El delito de trata de personas es considerado como un tema de interés actual para la sociedad, en vista de que se encuentra catalogado como la nueva forma de esclavitud moderna, el entender que el término “trata” el término oficial utilizado por Naciones Unidas para hacer referencia al comercio de seres humanos y a la explotación por parte de terceros a estos, especialmente en los ámbitos: sexual, laboral, militar, religioso e incluso familiar, ha permitido que nuestro país, debido a los compromisos adquiridos con la comunidad internacional, adopte el principio de la debida diligencia para implementar políticas destinadas a la prevención, persecución y protección en esta clase de delito, y que cada vez su estudio y conocimiento general se debe incrementar para evitar que existan más víctimas de un delito de lesa humanidad, como está considerado la trata de personas.

Trata de seres humanos y tráfico de inmigrantes en los albores del siglo XXI (Artículos Varios)

Esta investigación analiza con detalle la evolución conceptual y la heterogeneidad de definiciones entre dos tipos principales de tráfico de personas, esto es, la trata para la explotación de seres humanos y el tráfico de migrantes. Conjuntamente se estudia el desarrollo de la cooperación internacional de la acción supranacional y nacional en materia de lucha contra el tráfico de personas, se describen los aspectos más significativos y se analizan los obstáculos que la limitan o frenan, con el fin de vislumbrar instrumentos analíticos útiles para superarlos, como, por ejemplo, en el caso de la trata, los incluidos en el Convenio del Consejo de Europa, abierto a la firma el 16 de mayo de 2005.

Periodismo sin garantismo ¿La reaparición de la picota pública?

El presente trabajo se inscribe en el debate acerca del conflicto entre los principios constitucionales de información y protección del honor en el terreno del delito flagrante. se trata de la tensión sobre la situación judicial de las personas aprehendidas o capturadas y el actuar de los medios de comunicación, en la emergente corporativización de la Política criminal (seguridad pública) por la agenda periodística. Es una reflexión de cómo el periodismo y las garantías de los detenidos no comulgan alrededor del principio de presunción de inocencia, en donde el metamensaje de la noticia penal buscaría asilo en el populismo legislativo.

Between the lines: Konrad Wolf's 'Mama, ich lebe' and the dilemmas of betrayal

The article offers a close reading of Konrad Wolf’s anti-fascist Second World War film 'Mama, ich lebe' (DEFA, 1977). 'Mama, ich lebe', like all East German films about the Nazi past, deals with the re-founding of post-war Germany. Unlike the usual approach which focused on political redemption of the past crimes, Wolf’s approach explores rupture and failure of political agency as the pre-condition for a new beginning. The rupture is effected by the defection of four Wehrmacht soldiers who decide to cooperate with the Soviet enemy. Their betrayal of the national collective is ethically motivated and arises from their responsibility for the Soviet ‘other’. Its radicalness opens up a moment of utopian freedom and conciliation for the traitors. Yet the back side of betrayal is insecurity and confliction with regard to their role and roots. While the four meet their role as traitors with self-deception about their ambivalent position, they are eventually forced to acknowledge their position as one of self-defeat. Their ‘ethical betrayal’ (Parikh 2009) does therefore not lead to utopian fulfilment but to the traitors’ expiatory sacrifice as the only form of accountability and self-justification. In Wolf’s film antifascism as a tale of political redemption is thus revised and becomes a tale of necessary individual atonement.

Time and retribution

Retributivists believe that punishment can be deserved, and that deserved punishment is intrinsically good. They also believe that certain crimes deserve certain quantities of punishment. On the plausible assumption that the overall amount of any given punishment is a function of its severity and duration, we might think that retributivists (qua retributivists) would be indifferent as to whether a punishment were long and light or short and sharp, provided the offender gets the overall amount of punishment he deserves. In this paper I argue against this, showing that retributivists should actually prefer shorter and more severe punishments to longer, gentler options. I show this by focusing on, and developing a series of interpretations of, the retributivist claim that not punishing the guilty is bad, focussing on the relationship between that badness and time. I then show that each interpretation leads to a preference for shorter over longer punishment.

Transitional justice in Nepal: the Commission on Investigation of Disappeared Persons, Truth and Reconciliation Act 2014

The Commission on Investigation of Disappeared Persons, Truth and Reconciliation Act 2014 is Nepal’s latest attempt to establish a transitional programme to respond to conflict era abuses. In part, the Act remedies the inadequacies of the 2013 Ordinance. It creates two commissions, on truth and reconciliation and enforced disappearances, makes provision for the establishment of a Special Court to try past abuses and incorporates systems to enable vulnerable witnesses to participate in truth seeking. Yet in a number of respects it continues to fall short of international legal standards, not least in the possibility of amnesty for international crimes and gross violations of human rights. In addition, the relationship between the three mechanisms – truth seeking, amnesty and prosecution – remains unclear and safeguards for individual rights are lacking. This paper explores these recent developments, highlighting issues that must be remedied if transitional justice objectives are to be achieved in Nepal.

Information and punitiveness: trial reconstruction in Ireland

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to report results from a rape trial reconstruction in Ireland. Design/methodology/approach – A studio audience of 100 members of the Irish public were selected to attend a TV programme by the Republic of Ireland’s national broadcasting organisation. This involved the examination of the sentencing of a rape case. The audience’s sentencing preferences were measured at the outset, when they had been given only summary information about the case, and later, when full details had been disclosed. Findings – Previous research examining changes in public attitudes to crime and punishment has shown that deliberation, including the provision of new information and discussion with others and experts, tends to decrease public punitiveness and increase public leniency towards sentencing. An experiment in Ireland, however, showed that providing information does not invariably and necessarily moderate punitive attitudes. This paper presents the results, and offers some explanations for the anomalous outcome. Research limitations/implications – The pre/post design, in which the audience served as their own controls, is a weak one, and participants may have responded to what they took to be the agenda of the producers. Due to the quality of the sample, the results may not be generalisable to the broader Irish population. Practical implications – Policy makers should recognise that the public is not uniformly punitive for all crimes. There is good research evidence to show that the apparent public appetite for tough punishment is illusory, and is a function of the way that polls measure public attitudes to punishment. Sentencers and those responsible for sentencing policy would benefit from a fuller understanding of the sorts of cases which illicit strong punitive responses from the public, and the reasons for this response. However any such understanding should not simply translate into responsiveness to the public’s punitive sentiments – where these exist. Innovative survey methods – like this experiment – which attempt to look beyond the top-of-the-head opinions by providing information and opportunities for deliberation should be welcomed and used more widely. Originality/value – There have been limited research studies which reports factors which may increase punitiveness through the provision of information and deliberation.

Regurgitated bodies: presenting and representing trauma in 'The Act of Killing'

Focusing on The Act of Killing, this chapter examines how an “ethics of realism” operates on three key cinematic arenas: genre, authorship and spectatorship. As far as genre is concerned, the film’s realist commitment emerges from where it is least expected, namely from Hollywood genres, such as the musical, the film noir and the western, which are used as documentary, that is to say, as a fantasy realm where perpetrators can confess to their crimes without restraints or fear of punishment, but which nonetheless retains the evidentiary weight of the audiovisual medium. Authorship, in turn, translates as Oppenheimer’s unmistakable auteur signature through his role of self-confessed “infiltrator” who disguises as a sympathiser of the criminals in order to gain first-hand access to the full picture of their acts. One of them, the protagonist Anwar Congo, is clearly affected by post-traumatic stress disorder, and his repetitive reliving of his killings is made to flare up in front of the camera so as to bring back the dead to the present time in their material reality, through his own body, including a harrowing scene of the actor’s unpredictable and uncontrollable retching as he re-enacts the killing of his victims through strangulation. Finally, in the realm of spectatorship, the usual process of illusionistic identification on the part of the spectator is turned onto its head by means of disguising these criminals as amateur filmmakers, led to shoot, act within, and then watch their own film within the film so as to force them to experience beyond any illusion the suffering they had caused.

Treason, felony and Lollardy: a common petition in the hand of Richard Osbarn, Clerk of the Chamber of the Guildhall 1400–c. 1437

This article examines a common petition presented in the English parliament of 1425 requesting that those imprisoned for long periods for the crimes of treason, felony and Lollardy might be brought to trial. On the basis of palaeographical and orthographical evidence, this petition is demonstrated to be written by Richard Osbarn, clerk of the chamber of the London Guildhall between 1400 and 1437. The implications of this discovery throw new light on the way petitions were formulated, suggesting that the scribes of petitions played a greater role than previously thought, and in some cases identified with the complaint itself.

Gruvrätten vid Stora Kopparberget 1641-1682 : en undersökning över rannsakade brott och utdömda straff

The purpose of this essay is to examine and explain how the Swedish mining court of Stora Kopparberget (the Great Copper Mountain) implemented its judicial legislation between 1641-1682. Questions are asked about which counts of indictments the court tried, which sentences they handed out, in what quantities and how these results looks in comparison with other contemporary courts. The index cards of the court judicial protocols are the primary source of information. The methods are those of quantity- and comparative analysis.The results show that theft of copper ore was the most common crime ransacked by the court. Other common crimes were (in order): sin of omission, transgression of work directions, fights, slander and disdain, trade of stolen ore, failing appearance in court etc.Fines were by far the most common sentence followed by shorter imprisonments, gauntlets, loss of right to mine possession, twig beating, loss of work, penal servitude, banishment, “wooden horse riding” and finally military transcription. Even though previous re-search, in the field of Swedish specialized courts, is almost non existent evidence confirms great similarities between the Stora Kopparberget mining court and Sala mining court. This essay will, hopefully, enrich our knowledge of specialized courts, of 17th century mining industry and society and let us reach a broader understanding of the working conditions of the mountain.

Soft computing in biometrics : a pragmatic appraisal

The ever increasing spurt in digital crimes such as image manipulation, image tampering, signature forgery, image forgery, illegal transaction, etc. have hard pressed the demand to combat these forms of criminal activities. In this direction, biometrics - the computer-based validation of a persons' identity is becoming more and more essential particularly for high security systems. The essence of biometrics is the measurement of person’s physiological or behavioral characteristics, it enables authentication of a person’s identity. Biometric-based authentication is also becoming increasingly important in computer-based applications because the amount of sensitive data stored in such systems is growing. The new demands of biometric systems are robustness, high recognition rates, capability to handle imprecision, uncertainties of non-statistical kind and magnanimous flexibility. It is exactly here that, the role of soft computing techniques comes to play. The main aim of this write-up is to present a pragmatic view on applications of soft computing techniques in biometrics and to analyze its impact. It is found that soft computing has already made inroads in terms of individual methods or in combination. Applications of varieties of neural networks top the list followed by fuzzy logic and evolutionary algorithms. In a nutshell, the soft computing paradigms are used for biometric tasks such as feature extraction, dimensionality reduction, pattern identification, pattern mapping and the like.

A psicopatia e seu tratamento jurídico-penal

A pesquisa realizada visa atentar não só a sociedade, mas principalmente os profissionais envoltos na realidade jurídica para a necessidade de uma sanção adequada aos psicopatas, com a devida urgência. Esta individualização propiciará uma reação adequada dos juristas aos atos cometidos por estes indivíduos que não são ressocializados pela penalização comum, tampouco podem ser considerados doentes mentais, vez que não há tratamento químico benéfico para este transtorno que possuem. Indivíduos que tem consciência e capacidade de determinação na prática de atos ilícitos, mas necessitam biologicamente destas práticaspara satisfazerem-se e assim cometem crimes variados, de acordo com o grau de periculosidade deste transtorno. Reincidentes, que sem o tratamento legislativo adequado oferecem perigo eminente à sociedade. Apresentando e esclarecendo como trabalha a mente, as ações e reações de um psicopata, e, principalmente seus resultados jurídicos. Discorrente sobre a razão de procurar um caminho para realizar justiça, ou especialmente prevenir possíveis condutas criminosas. O desafio enfrentado no decorrer deste é encontrar respostas positivas dentro do que nos limita a Lei Maior, para que em um futuro próximo exista definitiva solução, utilizando-se de fontes bibliográficas em Direito, Psicologia, Psicologia Jurídica, Criminologia, Medicina Legal, Psiquiatria Forense, e ainda, algumas considerações jurisprudenciais.