How do private interest groups frame and shape European detention policies through the European jurisprudence?

• In Event: Prison Working Group: Prison reforms and policies

Abstract

The article aims to analyse the ways private interest groups shape European penal and detention policies (police stations, prison facilities, immigration detention centres and psychiatric hospitals for mentally ill offenders) in terms of either punitiveness or penal moderation through their strategic litigation activities before the European Court of Human Rights. In particular, two types of private groups, which both refers to NGOs and private foundations, seem to be particularly of interest, the conservative and the liberal ones from a scientific, political and funding perspectives. We assume that conservative groups convey ‘Crime Control’ values, the view that the proper role of the criminal process and criminal justice is to protect ‘law-abiding citizens’ from dangerous behaviours (Jones, 2010). Such “Crime Control” values would result in an increase in punitiveness and criminalisation. At the same time, the approach to penal and prison policies by conservative groups is characterised by its complexity as they promote forgiveness, reintegration and rehabilitation for certain offenders and exclusion of specific categories of offenders such as foreign terrorist fighters. In comparison, a majority of liberal groups apply a sceptical view of criminal justice that offers room for penal leniency. Nonetheless, liberal groups may well have fostered criminalisation and punitiveness to a certain extent through feminist advocacy for criminalisation of rape within marriage and harsher punishment for sexual offences; demands for specific and harsher punishment of femicide; “me-too” movement and defence of vulnerable persons in power relations leading to criminalisation and punishment of previously non-criminal “transgressive” behaviour. We forge the concept of moral entrepreneur of coercive human rights about litigation before the European Courts in the field of penal and prison policies to reflect this process.

Author

• Gaëtan Cliquennois, CNRS, Université of Nantes, DCS