On Monday, November 27, 2017, Jean-François Dreuille, Associate Professor of Private Law and Criminal Sciences at the Center for Public and Private Law on Obligations and Consumer Affairs (CDPPOC) and Dean of the USMB School of Law, will defend his habilitation thesis based on his work titled “Changes in Criminal Law: Progress or Regression?”
The defense will take place at 10 a.m. in the faculty lounge at Jean Moulin Lyon 3 University, located at 15 Quai Claude Bernard in Lyon.
thesis abstract
Looking at developments in criminal law—both substantive and procedural—in France since the late 1970s, one can observe a shift toward a security-oriented criminal justice policy. This trend intensified following the September 2001 attacks in the United States and has gained even greater momentum more recently in the wake of terrorist attacks on French soil. Legislative inflation and the vagueness that most often characterizes it undermine the principle of legality in criminal law. This is not the only pillar of criminal law that is faltering: the concept of guilt is gradually being diluted into that of dangerousness, with the aim of preemptively cracking down on specific categories of the criminal population. The signs of the gradual emergence of a criminal law of the enemy are clearer. Furthermore, and in a parallel trend, the blurring of traditional legal categories—administrative versus judicial—has never been more pronounced. The misinterpretation and misapplication of the right to security, the significant expansion of the arsenal of measures for the prevention and repression of terrorism, and the perpetuation of the state of emergency in ordinary law ultimately constitute the most obvious signs of this. Viewed through this lens, the transformations in criminal law reflect the idea of regression.
However, the picture is not quite so clear-cut: the significant rise in human rights—and particularly the rights of the defense—driven by a combination of the European Court of Human Rights’ interpretations, European harmonization, and, domestically, a trend toward the constitutionalization of criminal law, has curbed the legislature’s security-oriented impulses and reflexes. In other words, significant progress can also be observed during the period under study. The primary aim of this HDR defense will be to demonstrate this pendulum-like phenomenon, which attests to the ambiguity of changes in criminal law, by drawing on the most relevant works—theoretical and technical writings or oral presentations—to support this argument.