scholarly journals No Straight Answer: Homophobia as Both an Aggravating and Mitigating Factor in New Zealand Homicide Cases

2006 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 223 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisabeth McDonald

This article discusses recent New Zealand homicide cases in which male defendants have sought to rely on the partial defence of provocation to excuse the killing of a man who allegedly made them the subject of unwanted sexual advances.  The author argues that at least in cases in which such claims are unsuccessful, reference should be made to section 9(1)(h) of the Sentencing Act 2002, which renders homophobia an aggravating feature in sentencing.  To the extent that section 9(1)(h) is not relied on, while provocation is successfully pleaded in some cases, the author concludes that gay male citizens are not afforded equal protection under the criminal law.

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Justyna Eska-Mikołajewska

The article presents a comparative study on abortion legislation in Poland and New Zealand. It includes a historical overview of the social and political influences shaping the contemporary approach to abortion in these countries. The aim of the article is to discuss the changes to the Polish and New Zealand abortion legislation and the current procedures required to access abortion. This article highlights differences in approaches to this issue in both countries where abortion laws have evolved recently in opposite directions. In New Zealand, after removing abortion from the Crimes Act 1961, abortion ceased to be the subject to criminal law, while in Poland where one of the strictest anti-abortion laws had been in force already, a ban was imposed on abortion which made it practically impossible for women to access legal abortions.


Author(s):  
Peter J. Stoett

This chapter looks at whether and how international organizations and criminal law can help us deal effectively with transnational environmental crimes and, more broadly, with environmental insecurity and injustice. It explores the question of whether the climate change justice agenda can benefit from the expanded pursuit of transnational environmental crime. The chapter asks whether international environmental law, refurbished, act as a mitigating factor in climate change. It concludes that while current international legal instruments can help spur additional action, by themselves, they will prove inadequate. Consequently, one idea proposed is a new international environmental court to deter all forms of ecocide.


Author(s):  
Liana MacDonald ◽  
Adreanne Ormond

Racism in the Aotearoa New Zealand media is the subject of scholarly debate that examines how Māori (Indigenous Peoples of New Zealand) are broadcast in a negative and demeaning light. Literature demonstrates evolving understandings of how the industry places Pākehā (New Zealanders primarily of European descent) interests at the heart of broadcasting. We offer new insights by arguing that the media industry propagates a racial discourse of silencing that sustains widespread ignorance of the ways that Pākehā sensibilities mediate society. We draw attention to a silencing discourse through one televised story in 2018. On-screen interactions reproduce and safeguard a harmonious narrative of settler–Indigenous relations that support ignorance and denial of the structuring force of colonisation, and the Television Code of Broadcasting Practice upholds colour-blind perceptions of discrimination and injustice through liberal rhetoric. These processes ensure that the media industry is complicit in racism and the ongoing oppression of Indigenous peoples.


2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 84-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Iliadis ◽  
Imogen Richards ◽  
Mark A Wood

‘Newsmaking criminology’, as described by Barak, is the process by which criminologists contribute to the generation of ‘newsworthy’ media content about crime and justice, often through their engagement with broadcast and other news media. While newsmaking criminological practices have been the subject of detailed practitioner testimonials and theoretical treatise, there has been scarce empirical research on newsmaking criminology, particularly in relation to countries outside of the United States and United Kingdom. To illuminate the state of play of newsmaking criminology in Australia and New Zealand, in this paper we analyse findings from 116 survey responses and nine interviews with criminologists working in universities in these two countries, which provide insight into the extent and nature of their news media engagement, and their related perceptions. Our findings indicate that most criminologists working in Australia or New Zealand have made at least one news media appearance in the past two years, and the majority of respondents view news media engagement as a professional ‘duty’. Participants also identified key political, ethical, and logistical issues relevant to their news media engagement, with several expressing a view that radio and television interviewers can influence criminologists to say things that they deem ‘newsworthy’.


2012 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 312-332
Author(s):  
Malcolm Abbott

Throughout much of the history of the electricity industry in Australia and New Zealand the industry has been the subject of safety regulations. Although this regulation has been a constant throughout the life of the industry the organizational approach to regulation has changed over the years. Periodically in Australia and New Zealand history these questions have been raised in a political context, although notably the structure of safety regulators does not get much attention in the standard histories of the industry. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to discuss some of the general issues that have arisen in the reform of regulation in the case of electricity safety over the longer term and how it relates overall to the development of the electricity industry.


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.


2021 ◽  
Vol 36 (5) ◽  
pp. 347-355
Author(s):  
Tom Baker ◽  
Ryan Jones ◽  
Michael Mann ◽  
Nick Lewis

Drawing on observations at the 2017 Social Enterprise World Forum (SEWF) – a global conference held in Christchurch, New Zealand – this paper examines the significance of localised event spaces in shaping economic subjects and, by extension, economic sectors. Conferences such as the SEWF are sites and moments that provide access to new knowledge, foster collective action and shape the subjectivities of economic actors. We describe how the SEWF cultivated sympathetic affective responses towards social enterprise and the subject position of the social entrepreneur, and demonstrate how the local specificities of Christchurch, as a place, were key to the cultivation of social-entrepreneurial subjectivity at the SEWF.


Author(s):  
Markus D. Dubber

This chapter reflects on various traditional approaches to the historical study of European criminal law in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It examines several ways of naming and framing the subject matter, along with ways of ‘covering’ it along a set of by now fairly well-established narrative paths that generally reflect a quietly reassuring Whiggishness. It then lays out an alternative, two-track, conception of ‘modern’ European criminal legal history. It does this by taking an upside-down—or outside-in—view of the subject, by focusing on an understudied, but fascinating, project of European criminal law: the invention, implementation, and evolution of colonial criminal law.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
German Molina

<p><b>The fact that comfort is a subjective state of the mind is widely accepted by engineers, architects and building scientists. Despite this, capturing all the complexity, subjectivity and richness of this construct in models that are useful in building science contexts is far from straightforward. By prioritizing usability, building science has produced models of comfort (e.g., acoustic, visual and thermal) that overly simplify this concept to something nearly objective that can be directly associated with people’s physiology and measurable and quantifiable environmental factors. This is a contradiction because, even if comfort is supposed to be subjective, most of the complexity of “the subject” is avoided by focusing on physiology; and, even if comfort is supposed to reside in the mind, the cognitive processes that characterize the mind are disregarded. This research partially mitigates this contradiction by exploring people’s non-physical personal factors and cognition within the context of their comfort and by proposing a way in which they can be incorporated into building science research and practice. This research refers to these elements together—i.e., people’s non-physical personal factors and cognition—as “the mind”.</b></p> <p>This research proposes a new qualitative model of the Feeling of Comfort that embraces “the mind”. This model was developed from the results of a first study in which 18 people—from Chile and New Zealand—were asked to describe “a home with good daylight” and “a warm home” in their own words. These results were then replicated in a second study in which another group of 24 people—also from Chile and New Zealand—described “a home with good acoustic performance”, “a home with good air quality” and “a pleasantly cool home”. The Feeling of Comfort model not only was capable of making sense of the new data (gathered in this second study) but also proved to be simple enough to be useful in the context of comfort research and practice. For instance, it guided the development of a quantitative Feeling of Comfort model and also of a prototype building simulation tool that embraces “the mind” and thus can potentially estimate people’s Feeling of Comfort.</p> <p>This research concludes that embracing “the mind” is not only possible but necessary. The reason for this is that “the mind” plays a significant role in the development of people’s comfort. Thus, theories and models of comfort that ignore it fail to represent properly the concept of comfort held by the people for whom buildings are designed. However, incorporating “the mind” into building science’s research and practice implies embracing tools, research methods and conceptual frameworks that have historically not been used by such a discipline. Specifically, it concludes that building science should normalize a more holistic view of comfort and perform more exploratory and qualitative research.</p>


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