scholarly journals Safeguarding the Dignity of Women under the Criminal Law Amendment Act 2013-A Critical Analysis

2013 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 44
Author(s):  
R C Borpatragohain

This viewpoint aims to analyse the Criminal Law Amendment Act 2013 from a legal perspective. In doing so, it discusses the statutory safeguards of rights to a dignified life of a woman by analysing the various existing laws, which have been significantly amended to build the Criminal Act, 2013. These laws are: Indian Penal Code (IPC) 1860; Indian Evidence Act 1872, Code of Criminal Procedure as amended in 1973, Immoral Trafficking Prevention Act 1956, Information Technology Act 2000, The Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act 2000, The Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act 2005, The Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012, The Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act 2013. In the conclusion, I urge that although efficient laws are in operation in India towards protecting the right to live with dignity of women, however, incidents of violence against women are on the rise. Hence, a concerted effort in bringing appropriate attitudinal change is the task ahead for all Indians.

2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (5) ◽  
pp. 691-702
Author(s):  
Boris Burghardt ◽  
Leonie Steinl

AbstractIn recent years, no area of criminal law has received more public attention than the laws on sexual violence. Discussions about the need for reforms have exhibited a mobilizing force extending far beyond the legal community. From a legal perspective, these discussions concern intricate normative questions regarding the content of the right to sexual autonomy and the suitability of the consent paradigm to establish the limitations of its protection under criminal law. At the same time, they ultimately concern the question of gender-related societal power hierarchies. Acknowledging these broader socio-political dimensions allows us to comprehend the highly contentious manner in which this debate is often conducted. This Special Issue attempts to analyze from a transnational perspective both the fundamental legal and socio-political questions in the current discussions on sexual violence and criminal justice. A recurring theme is the question as to whether criminal law can be used not only as an instrument of repressive social control, but also as a means of power-critical – even emancipatory – social policy.


2021 ◽  
pp. 203228442110082
Author(s):  
Tomohiro Nakane

In recent years, there has been a tendency in cases of violence against women and sexual offences to prosecute them, regardless of whether the victim files their complaint. This article investigates the recent changes in European criminal law in this respect. The results indicate a variety of approaches under European Union (EU) law, Council of Europe (CoE) law and domestic approaches. Furthermore, existing EU and CoE law has not suggested an ‘in-between’ approach, which exists in some national legal systems such as that of Germany. On that basis, this article suggests a number of amendments to current EU and CoE law.


2005 ◽  
Vol 99 (4) ◽  
pp. 778-816 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Engle

Today many feminists seem relatively content with the treatment of rape and other sexual violence against women under international criminal law. In the context of the conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the early 1990s, feminist activists made a concerted effort to affect the statute establishing the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the rules of evidence under which rape and other crimes of sexual violence would be prosecuted, the form the indictments of crimes of sexual violence would take, and the strategies and legal argumentation made at both the trial and the appellate levels. For the most part, much to the surprise of many feminists themselves, they have been successful. As Joanne Barkan comments: “From the start, most observers considered the [ICTY] a sop to human rights and feminist activists who wanted intervention.... Almost no one expected it to succeed. And yet to some extent, at least for women, it did.”


Author(s):  
Markus D. Dubber

Part III of Dual Penal State uses dual penal state analysis to generate a comparative-historical account of American penality. With comparative glimpses at Germany and, to a lesser extent, England, it distinguishes between two responses to the shared challenge of legitimating state penal power in a modern liberal democratic state: (1) the failure to appreciate the legitimatory challenge of modern state penal power in particular (United States) and of modern state power in general (England); and (2) the failure to address the legitimatory challenge of modern state penal power as an ongoing existential threat to the legitimacy of the state (Germany). Chapter 6 undertakes a critical analysis of Jefferson’s 1779 draft of a criminal law bill for the State of Virginia, concluding that it fell well short of a criminal code that reflected the ideals of the American legal-political project as spelled out, for instance, in Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence of 1776.


Author(s):  
Markus D. Dubber

The first part of Dual Penal State investigated various ways in which criminal law doctrine and scholarship (or “science”) have failed to address the challenge of legitimating penal power in a modern liberal democratic state. This, second, part explores an alternative approach to criminal law discourse that puts the legitimacy challenge of modern penal law front and center: critical analysis of criminal law in a dual penal state. Dual penal state analysis differentiates between penal law and penal police, two conceptions of penal power, and state power more generally, rooted in autonomy, equality, and interpersonal respect, on one hand, and in heteronomy, hierarchy, and patriarchal power, on the other. Chapter 4 applies the distinction between law and police as fundamental modes of governance set out in Chapter 3 to the penal realm and explores the tension between penal law and penal police as constituting the dual penal state.


Author(s):  
I. Mytrofanov

The article states that today the issues of the role (purpose) of criminal law, the structure of criminal law knowledge remain debatable. And at this time, questions arise: whose interests are protected by criminal law, is it able to ensure social justice, including the proportionality of the responsibility of the individual and the state for criminally illegal actions? The purpose of the article is to comprehend the problems of criminal law knowledge about the phenomena that shape the purpose of criminal law as a fair regulator of public relations, aimed primarily at restoring social justice for the victim, suspect (accused), society and the state, the proportionality of punishment and states for criminally illegal acts. The concepts of “crime” and “punishment” are discussed in science. As a result, there is no increase in knowledge, but an increase in its volume due to new definitions of existing criminal law phenomena. It is stated that the science of criminal law has not been able to explain the need for the concept of criminal law, as the role and name of this area is leveled to the framework terminology, which currently contains the categories of crime and punishment. Sometimes it is not even unreasonable to think that criminal law as an independent and meaningful concept does not exist or has not yet appeared. There was a custom to characterize this right as something derived from the main and most important branches of law, the criminal law of the rules of subsidiary and ancillary nature. Scholars do not consider criminal law, for example, as the right to self-defense. Although the right to self-defense is paramount and must first be guaranteed to a person who is almost always left alone with the offender, it is the least represented in law, developed in practice and available to criminal law subjects. Today, for example, there are no clear rules for the necessary protection of property rights or human freedoms. It is concluded that the science of criminal law should develop knowledge that will reveal not only the content of the subject of this branch of law, but will focus it on new properties to determine the illegality of acts and their consequences, exclude the possibility of using its means by legal entities against each other.


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