International Journal on Criminology Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 2015 | Page 15

Terrorism and Criminal Law
Frédéric Debove A
International Journal on Criminology - Spring 2015, Volume 3, Number 1
Crime represents a grave challenge to society-- all the more so in the cases of crimes
against society and crimes against the nation. Terrorism, with its traditional
entourage of violence and intimidation, is the most direct threat to the fundamental
interests of democratic nations. The way in which it is perpetrated, and the ability it has
to immediately capture the attention of the media, enable terrorism to impact heavily on
public perception making it a formidable instrument of propaganda and blackmail. At the
turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, terrorism was essentially anarchistic or
nihilistic. The relatively marginal violence of that time was followed, immediately after the
war, by a wave of armed struggle connected with decolonization. Since then, the driving
forces behind terrorist activity have been varied and belong in essence to several categories
that may intersect in certain circumstances. Some groups are part of regionalist, separatist
movements (ETA in Spain, the IRA in the United Kingdom, the FLNC in France, the PKK
in Turkey, and so forth). Others represent a revolutionary current (the Red Brigades in Italy,
the Baader–Meinhof Gang and the Red Army Faction in Germany, the KLV in Kosovo, and
the Japanese Red Army in Japan, among others).
Since the mid-1980s, we have seen unstable, autonomous, uncontrollable
fundamentalist groups, such as the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), Lebanese Hezbollah,
the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) in Algeria, the Moroccan Islamic
Combatant Group (GICM), Boko Haram, al-Shabaab, and groups connected to the Al-
Qaeda network. They are driven by a culture of martyrdom and hatred for the West; they are
sometimes in ideological competition with each other. (Evidence of this can be seen in the
rivalry that exists between the “offshoots” of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and
the “franchises” of the Islamic State (IS) in Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Saudi Arabia,
and Yemen.) These groups have carried out waves of attacks linked to the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict and to the never-ending confrontations in Afghanistan and Iraq: this was notably
the case in France (1986 and 1995), in the United States (September 2011, 2,978 dead), in
Indonesia (October 2002, 202 dead), in Spain (March 2004, 191 dead), and in London (July
2005, 56 dead).
France is not more threatened by the famous “clash of civilizations” than other
Western democracies, but it is a potential target because its values (freedom, tolerance,
respect for women, secularism, human rights, and so forth) are radically opposed to those of
the fundamentalism of the new world disorder.
After the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989 and the end of the bipolar world order
whereby the West faced (confronted although I like the play on words rendered by “faced”)the
A
Head of the Institute of Law and Economics at the Université Panthéon-Assas; Associate Professor at ENM
(École National de la Magistrature [National School for the Judiciary]), ENSP (École Nationale Supérieure
de la Police [National Police College]), and EOGN (École des officiers de la Gendarmerie nationale [Gendarmerie
Officer Training College]); Reporter to France’s Defender of Rights.
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