Human rights and European penology

• In Event: Roundtable: Routledge Handbook on European Penology – III. Transversal European developments

Abstract

In this presentation, we scrutinise two opposite trends that have been endorsed by the criminological and socio-legal literature on human rights and European penality. First, we analyse the ways human rights can tame punitiveness. Second, we put emphasis on how human rights could contribute on the contrary to punitiveness through coercion and litigation. In this regard, we make the assumption that both trends coexist in Europe and could explain the existing penal contradictions and even the so-called penal volatility.
Future research should investigate both these movements in a balanced way and should study the contradictions to which these human rights protections lead.

Author

• Gaëtan Cliquennois, CNRS, Université of Nantes, DCS