Criminal policy ideas in professor Stojanović works

Abstract

And the shortest insight into some of the papers that professor Zoran Stojanović has dealt with in criminal political topics shows that for thirty years he consistently advocated ideas of criminal and selective minimalism, plead for the reduction of the criminal reaction to the limits determined by the principle of ultima ratio. Already in his first papers, he points to the tendency of criminal legal expansionism in which the norms of this branch of law begin to be used as a means to solve the accumulated problems arising from the crisis of modern society. In an effort to convince citizens that they are doing everything they can to make their sense of vulnerability, government representatives resort to the means that require the least effort: to amend criminal legislation whose incriminations spread a zone of punishability, and the changes in the sanctions system foresee increasingly severe penalties. Therefore, this trend is not only the result of incompetence, but is even more a result of political manipulation. Therefore, instead of the deliberate action of social subjects that should eliminate factors that, for example, lead to violence against peers or in the family, into organized crime and corruption - they resort to retribution and the construction of an omnipotent system of social control. On the contrary, professor Stojanović advocates for decriminalization, not only because of the need to make more effective criminal justice system, but also because of the respect for human rights. In a measured and documented manner, the author points to another worrying tendency in this area - that criminal law is becoming a more and more means of leading an internal policy. Under the pretext that terrorism, organized crime, corruption and pedophilia must be suppressed by the introduction of measures proclaimed as 'war crimes,' lawmakers today often resort to measures that are not only unacceptable from the standpoint of the principles of criminal justice for centuries, but directly affecting both fundamental human rights. It's being built, therefore, what is referred to in German literature as 'the criminal law of the enemy', which the perpetrator does not regard as a human being who violated the law, but as an individual to be eliminated from society. The Professor resolutely opposes such tendencies. He stands up against the beginnings of some 'anti-terrorist', 'anti-mafia' or 'anticorruption criminal laws' and the creation of special bodies for the application of such norms.