The Constitution of the Republic of Serbia safeguards the right to privacy through several aspects, as does the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. The cornerstone in this area is the Law on Personal Data Protection from 2018. In line with the ultima ratio principle of criminal law, the Criminal Code protects these data when the most severe violations occur, pursuant to the Criminal Procedure Code. However, with the daily expansion of science, technology, and innovative means of communication and recording, this takes on a different, "digital" dimension. Naturally, this trend calls for certain adjustments in regulations, as well as in their interpretation and application. In this paper, the authors aim to highlight key provisions of the aforementioned regulations and their current and future interpretation within the context of digital society, with a particular focus on criminal law aspects. This complexity is further amplified by the development of artificial intelligence, which inherently relies on the use of vast amounts of data. The aim of this paper is to identify some of the critical elements in the protection of privacy rights, particularly those related to personal data most closely linked to individuals, and to raise the question of potential legislative amendments.
Natali Helberger, Frederik Zuiderveen Borgesius, Agustin Reyna
In modern markets, many companies offer so-called 'free' services and monetize consumer data they collect through those services. This paper argues that consumer law and data protection law can usefully complement each other. Data protection law can also inform the interpretation of consumer law. Using consumer rights, consumers should be able to challenge excessive collection of their personal data. Consumer organizations have used consumer law to tackle data protection infringements. The interplay of data protection law and consumer protection law provides exciting opportunities for a more integrated vision on 'data consumer law'.
Because there are similarities between the evaluation of alternative stories in criminal trials and the evaluation of scientific theories, scholars have looked to literature in epistemology and the philosophy of science for insights on the evaluation of evidence in criminal trials. The philosophical literature is divided, however, on a key point -- the epistemic value of novel predictive success. This article uses a Bayesian network analysis to explore, in the context of a criminal case, the circumstances in which "new evidence" discovered after a theory is propounded, can provide stronger (or weaker) support for the theory than "old evidence" that was accommodated by the theory. It argues that insights from analysis of the strength of "new" and "old" evidence in the criminal case can be applied more generally when assessing the relative merits of prediction and accommodation in scientific theory development, and are thus helpful in addressing the longstanding philosophic controversy over this issue.
Lorenz Meinen, Astrid Schomäcker, Stefanie Wiedemann
et al.
The emergence of deepfake technologies offers both opportunities and significant challenges. While commonly associated with deception, misinformation, and fraud, deepfakes may also enable novel applications in high-stakes contexts such as criminal investigations. However, these applications raise complex technological, ethical, and legal questions. We adopt an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on computer science, philosophy, and law, to examine what it takes to responsibly use deepfakes in criminal investigations and argue that computer-mediated communication (CMC) research, especially based on social media corpora, can provide crucial insights for understanding the potential harms and benefits of deepfakes. Our analysis outlines key research directions for the CMC community and underscores the need for interdisciplinary collaboration in this evolving domain.
Laura State, Alejandra Bringas Colmenarejo, Andrea Beretta
et al.
Explainable AI (XAI) provides methods to understand non-interpretable machine learning models. However, we have little knowledge about what legal experts expect from these explanations, including their legal compliance with, and value against European Union legislation. To close this gap, we present the Explanation Dialogues, an expert focus study to uncover the expectations, reasoning, and understanding of legal experts and practitioners towards XAI, with a specific focus on the European General Data Protection Regulation. The study consists of an online questionnaire and follow-up interviews, and is centered around a use-case in the credit domain. We extract both a set of hierarchical and interconnected codes using grounded theory, and present the standpoints of the participating experts towards XAI. We find that the presented explanations are hard to understand and lack information, and discuss issues that can arise from the different interests of the data controller and subject. Finally, we present a set of recommendations for developers of XAI methods, and indications of legal areas of discussion. Among others, recommendations address the presentation, choice, and content of an explanation, technical risks as well as the end-user, while we provide legal pointers to the contestability of explanations, transparency thresholds, intellectual property rights as well as the relationship between involved parties.
Testing of evidence in an alleged sexual assault case not only seeks to address the question of who was involved, but also looks to answer the question of what biological source provided the DNA. It can be difficult to obtain positive serological data on challenging samples such as laundered items, low-level DNA samples, or sexual assault kit swabs obtained after a prolonged interval from the time of assault. In the absence of confirmatory serological results, an expert witness often cannot speak to the biological source of the DNA. In order to determine quantitation thresholds which could be used to deduce the presence of spermatozoa (sperm) within a sample, we evaluated the fractionation of male DNA utilizing our laboratory’s differential extraction method. Study samples included serial dilutions of semen and semen/saliva mixtures, post-coital and laundered samples as well as casework data from 1,729 samples that were processed using a differential extraction. Based on this data, it was determined that a sample which had at least 200 picograms of male DNA and at least 10% of the total male DNA in fraction 2 (F2, also known as the sperm-enriched or sperm fraction) could be reported as positive for the presence of sperm. No false positive results were obtained from the study-generated samples when using these thresholds to infer the presence of sperm. Additionally, samples that contained sperm, but were negative using traditional serological methods, could be detected. However, not all sperm-containing samples fractionated above both thresholds; therefore, serological testing may still be necessary to minimize false negative results. The thresholds developed here, proved reliable to deduce the presence of sperm in real casework samples.
The malpractice is still far from the reach of criminal procedure. There are no specific regulations on malpractice and there are problems in proving criminal acts of malpractice so that this article uses the theory of evidence to provide legal certainty to fulfill the elements of error and criminal responsibility. This study uses a normative method to answer this problem so that the statute approach and case approach are used. The results of the study show that the problems in proving criminal acts of malpractice and the difficulty of collecting evidence (unus testis nullus testis) are obstacles to assisting the legal process, the complexity of proof in criminal law which is material and problematic in the legal vacuum space limited to the Criminal Code. Contextually, criminal responsibility for malpractice is not specifically regulated in the Criminal Code or medical malpractice, but after the enactment of Law 17 of 2023 concerning Health, it provides hope in protection and helps victims in seeking justice even though cases reported by victims are often in SP3 (Investigation Termination Order).
The aim is to find out the provisions governing the criminal act of violating adultery or immorality committed by the Indonesian National Armed Forces. This research uses the method The type of research in this study is normative juridical law research, namely research based on literature studies which includes primary legal materials and secondary legal materials. Legal Consequences Regarding the crime of violating decency/adultery committed by the Indonesian National Armed Forces, the perpetrator is subject to Article 281 paragraph (1) of the Criminal Code Juncto Article 26 of the Criminal Procedure Code, Article 190 paragraph (1), paragraph (3), paragraph (4) of the Law of the Republic of Indonesia Number 31 of 1997 concerning Military Justice, namely in addition to the main punishment in the form of imprisonment, as well as additional punishment in the form of being dismissed from military service.
Alisson C. C. Silva, Fábio N. Demarqui, Bráulio F. Silva
et al.
The life course perspective in criminology has become prominent last years, offering valuable insights into various patterns of criminal offending and pathways. The study of criminal trajectories aims to understand the beginning, persistence and desistence in crime, providing intriguing explanations about these moments in life. Central to this analysis is the identification of patterns in the frequency of criminal victimization and recidivism, along with the factors that contribute to them. Specifically, this work introduces a new class of models that overcome limitations in traditional methods used to analyze criminal recidivism. These models are designed for recurrent events data characterized by excess of zeros and spatial correlation. They extend the Non-Homogeneous Poisson Process, incorporating spatial dependence in the model through random effects, enabling the analysis of associations among individuals within the same spatial stratum. To deal with the excess of zeros in the data, a zero-inflated Poisson mixed model was incorporated. In addition to parametric models following the Power Law process for baseline intensity functions, we propose flexible semi-parametric versions approximating the intensity function using Bernstein Polynomials. The Bayesian approach offers advantages such as incorporating external evidence and modeling specific correlations between random effects and observed data. The performance of these models was evaluated in a simulation study with various scenarios, and we applied them to analyze criminal recidivism data in the Metropolitan Region of Belo Horizonte, Brazil. The results provide a detailed analysis of high-risk areas for recurrent crimes and the behavior of recidivism rates over time. This research significantly enhances our understanding of criminal trajectories, paving the way for more effective strategies in combating criminal recidivism.
Criminal networks arise from the unique attempt to balance a need of establishing frequent ties among affiliates to facilitate the coordination of illegal activities, with the necessity to sparsify the overall connectivity architecture to hide from law enforcement. This efficiency-security tradeoff is also combined with the creation of groups of redundant criminals that exhibit similar connectivity patterns, thus guaranteeing resilient network architectures. State-of-the-art models for such data are not designed to infer these unique structures. In contrast to such solutions we develop a computationally-tractable Bayesian zero-inflated Poisson stochastic block model (ZIP-SBM), which identifies groups of redundant criminals with similar connectivity patterns, and infers both overt and covert block interactions within and across such groups. This is accomplished by modeling weighted ties (corresponding to counts of interactions among pairs of criminals) via zero-inflated Poisson distributions with block-specific parameters that quantify complex patterns in the excess of zero ties in each block (security) relative to the distribution of the observed weighted ties within that block (efficiency). The performance of ZIP-SBM is illustrated in simulations and in a study of summits co-attendances in a complex Mafia organization, where we unveil efficiency-security structures adopted by the criminal organization that were hidden to previous analyses.
Criminal case matching endeavors to determine the relevance between different criminal cases. Conventional methods predict the relevance solely based on instance-level semantic features and neglect the diverse legal factors (LFs), which are associated with diverse court judgments. Consequently, comprehensively representing a criminal case remains a challenge for these approaches. Moreover, extracting and utilizing these LFs for criminal case matching face two challenges: (1) the manual annotations of LFs rely heavily on specialized legal knowledge; (2) overlaps among LFs may potentially harm the model's performance. In this paper, we propose a two-stage framework named Diverse Legal Factor-enhanced Criminal Case Matching (DLF-CCM). Firstly, DLF-CCM employs a multi-task learning framework to pre-train an LF extraction network on a large-scale legal judgment prediction dataset. In stage two, DLF-CCM introduces an LF de-redundancy module to learn shared LF and exclusive LFs. Moreover, an entropy-weighted fusion strategy is introduced to dynamically fuse the multiple relevance generated by all LFs. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of DLF-CCM and show its significant improvements over competitive baselines. Code: https://github.com/jiezhao6/DLF-CCM.
This paper addresses a critical gap in legal analytics by developing and applying a novel taxonomy for topic classification of summary judgment cases in the United Kingdom. Using a curated dataset of summary judgment cases, we use the Large Language Model Claude 3 Opus to explore functional topics and trends. We find that Claude 3 Opus correctly classified the topic with an accuracy of 87.13% and an F1 score of 0.87. The analysis reveals distinct patterns in the application of summary judgments across various legal domains. As case law in the United Kingdom is not originally labelled with keywords or a topic filtering option, the findings not only refine our understanding of the thematic underpinnings of summary judgments but also illustrate the potential of combining traditional and AI-driven approaches in legal classification. Therefore, this paper provides a new and general taxonomy for UK law. The implications of this work serve as a foundation for further research and policy discussions in the field of judicial administration and computational legal research methodologies.
The cybercriminal underground consists of hundreds of forum communities that function as marketplaces and information-exchange platforms for both established and wannabe cybercriminals. The ecosystem is continuously evolving, with users migrating between forums and platforms. The emergence of cybercrime communities in Telegram and Discord only highlights the rising fragmentation and adaptability of the ecosystem. In this position paper, we explore the economic incentives and trust-building mechanisms that may drive a participant (hereafter, Dmitry) of the cybercriminal underground ecosystem to migrate from one forum or platform to another. What are the market signals that matter to Dmitry's decision of joining a specific community, and what roles and purposes do these communities or platforms play within the broader ecosystem? Ultimately, we build towards our thesis that by studying these mechanisms we could explain, and therefore act upon, Dmitry's choice of joining a criminal community rather than another. To build this argument, we first discuss previous work evaluating differences in trust signals depicted in criminal forums. We then present preliminary results evaluating criminal channels on Telegram using those same lenses. Further, we analyze the different roles these channels play in the criminal ecosystem. We then discuss implications for future research.
People can be treated unjustly with respect to the level of credibility others accord to their testimony. This is the core idea of the philosophical idea of epistemic justice. It should be of utmost interest to criminal law which extensively deals with normative issues of evidence and testimony. It may reconstruct some of the long-standing criticisms of criminal law regarding credibility assessments and the treatment of witnesses, especially in sexual assault cases. However, philosophical discussions often overlook the intricate complexities of real procedural law and its underlying considerations. In its present form, the philosophical notion of epistemic injustice provides limited insights into legal discourse; it necessitates translation and adaptation. This study contributes to this endeavor by examining the contentious issue of testimony from witnesses who have undergone trauma-focused psychotherapy. Since the 1980s, courts worldwide were troubled with cases of false accusations based on false memories generated by suggestive therapeutic interventions. As a result, such post-therapy testimonies are discounted in one way or another in many jurisdictions. However, courts are still confronted with such testimonies, and the modi vivendi legal systems have established to deal with them continue to give rise to concerns about unjust treatment of witnesses. The question is thus whether legal rules or established practices of evaluating testimony based on memories which resurfaced after psychotherapy are epistemically and legally just. The paper presents seven ways in which courts may assess such testimonies and examines them in light of epistemic and procedural justice. Some of them prima facie constitute a form of epistemic injustice because they discount testimonies to an unwarranted degree. But these injustices might be justified by overriding principles favoring defendants. Nonetheless, the idea of epistemic justice, more broadly understood, inspires two principles that may serve as a foundation for a future conception of epistemic justice adapted to the law.
Objective: elucidating the potential of digital transformation for elaborating the optimal means and methods of collecting evidences and introducing scientific organization of labor of the officials implementing criminal procedure. The scientific approach within the concept consists in minimizing the costs of collecting evidentiary information in criminal cases in electronic form and by electronic means, as well as storing the criminal case materials in electronic form.Methods: dialectic method occupies the leading position among the research methods, the issues of electronic documentation being considered in the interaction and interdependence with information-technological development of the society. The set of scientific cognition methods within the research creates prerequisites for objective and comprehensive approach to the problems under study.Results: the authors’ concept of electronic evidence is a system of information-technological and legal views on the criminal-procedural form, which is intended for optimizing the process of collecting, registering and preserving them in the criminal case materials. The concept development is aimed at elaborating new approaches to organizing the work of investigation agencies and courts, taking into account the achievements in the sphere of information technologies, providing new techniques of collecting criminal-relevant, criminal-procedural, criminological significant information when investigating and hearing of a criminal case. The proposed concept is also aimed at improving interaction and in-service communication of the officials of the preliminary investigation bodies with the officials of information-technological systems for the purposes of collecting evidentiary information in electronic form.Scientific novelty: the changes were systemically analyzed, which are taking place in the contemporary information society, through the prism of the emerging problems between the sectoral criminal-procedural evidentiary law and more modern technological means of collecting evidentiary information. The article demonstrates a new approach to creating technological interaction using digital technologies, on the scientific base of organization of proving activity, intended to optimize and rationalize the process of proving in criminal procedure.Practical significance: the research materials can be used to prepare proposals on making changes and additions in the current legislation with a view of implementing the practice of already functioning models of criminal-procedural activity of foreign countries, an inexhaustible potential of information-technologies, software, and artificial intelligence to rationalize proving in criminal cases.
Виктор Николаевич Григорьев, О.А. Зайцев, Олег Александрович Максимов
Based on the understanding of the criminal procedure as a means for the protection of rights and freedoms of the individual involved in criminal proceedings, the authors consider unresolved problems and the most topical issues for theory and practice of petitions and complaints in this field. Petitions and complaints are given the appropriate place of a fundamental element in determining the essence of criminal procedure. Purpose: based on the modern understanding of the aim of criminal procedure, to formulate the main directions of the study of the legal institution of petitions and complaints in order to determine their place in the system of theoretical knowledge and in practice. Methods: system analysis, formal and dialectical logic, interpretation of legal norms, comparative historical, comparative legal. Results: the study reveals the relevance of petitions and complaints to the purpose of criminal proceedings, which is to protect the rights and freedoms of persons involved in criminal proceedings. The institution in question, previously underestimated, plays a significant and sometimes decisive role in society’s assessment of the effectiveness of criminal procedure activities in modern conditions. The main lines of scientific researches are identified, which should eventually lead to the development of a full-fledged mechanism for exercising the right to petitions and complaints as a universal and specific legal means that ensures that criminal procedure activity complies with its purpose and the demands of civil society.
Abstract Trust and the feeling of being protected is the core value of the legal process. Trust should not be confused with the idea of goodwill. Goodwill is not normative of the criminal law, but it is a concept of the private law. A similar principle of trust in criminal law is the intent, which terminologically has a better connotation with criminal law than goodwill. Nevertheless, there is still a part that this definition does not include and leaves gaps in which the word trust is better used as a definition. The principles of legality and lex stricta are values in criminal law and also have their interpretations widely used. Main topic of this paper is the usage of the word trust and the need to trust the criminal law and have faith in it. A faith which is built in centuries and cases after cases which have led to a general conclusion. The conclusion is not to question the criminal process, the lawyers or judges and its paragraphs but to accept it as it is and follow its directions. Examples, case studies and other central topics can lead to a better understanding of the good faith in criminal law.
Introduction: the article is devoted to theoretical aspects of the implementation
of personal responsibility of the Chairman of the Government of the Russian
Federation to the President of the Russian Federation. The author analyzes Article
113 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation, as well as norms of the Federal
Constitutional Law “On the Government of the Russian Federation” regulating
personal responsibility of the Chairman of the Government of the Russian
Federation in case of improper execution of his powers. It is noted that personal
responsibility arises in the process of carrying out certain activities, within the
framework of which a respectful and positive attitude of the subject to this activity
is formed in order to achieve a positive result. Purpose: to give a theoretical and
legal characterization of personal responsibility, as well as consider problematic
issues of its implementation. The authors formulate the following research
tasks characterizing the logical chain of reflections on personal responsibility
and punishment of the Chairman of the Government of the Russian Federation:
to consider general issues of personal responsibility of the Government of the
Russian Federation; analyze key elements of personal responsibility; characterize
the basics for implementing Article 113 of the Constitution of the Russian
Federation and identify certain aspects. Methods: the methodology is determined
by the specifics of the legal regulation of personal responsibility implementation.
The article uses a complex of general scientific (dialectical, analysis and
synthesis, system-structural approach) and special cognition methods. The
formal legal method helps analyze provisions of legal acts regulating the process
of implementing personal responsibility. Results: Personal responsibility can
be realized both in positive and negative aspects. At the same time, there are 2
types: constitutional and legal, and disciplinary responsibility. The author models
the process of implementing personal responsibility on the example of bringing
the Chairman of the Government of the Russian Federation to legal liability.
Conclusion: based on the conducted research, it is concluded that there are
many unresolved problems of an applied nature in the field under consideration,
which do not allow us to talk about effectiveness of personal responsibility. The
legislative consolidation of this type of responsibility does not clarify the process
of its implementation. It is necessary to actively continue scientific research and
legislative initiatives on the analyzed issue, which will improve the quality of public administration.