Empowering the Victims of Crime : A Real Goal of the Criminal Justice System or No More Than a Pipe Dream?

Współautorstwo: Buczkowski, Konrad; Wiktorska, Paulina

Trust and Legitimacy in Criminal Justice : European Perspectives / Gorazd Meško, Justice Tankebe (eds.) – Cham: Springer, 2015, s. 65-92.

This chapter discusses victim empowerment from a victimological perspective on three levels. The first concerns legislative issues. Selected Polish statutes aimed at giving greater protection to victims of crime are analyzed, along with their most recent amendments. The justifications for these amendments (i.e., the aims and assumptions that guided the legislature), which include compensation for victims of crime, the rights and safeguards for victims in criminal proceedings, and the situation regarding victims of domestic violence, are the main object of this study. The second level involves verifying how these legislative assumptions actually work in practice in the justice system. Assessing whether, and to what extent, victims of crime have been able to exercise their rights, i.e., the extent to which the justice system takes the interests of victims of crime into consideration and ensures that they are supported and protected and not subjected to secondary victimization, has been made possible by analyzing a variety of victimological studies. The third level involves analyzing discourse. Some of the public debate on signing the Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence, which was recently held in Poland, is elucidated and explained. The sometimes heated arguments that broke out among those both for and against show that the attitude to victims of crime and the necessity of ensuring them legal protection is a difficult subject in Poland. The very question of protecting and assisting victims is often pushed aside in favor of ideological contentions. The issues raised allow for an evaluation as to whether the rights of victims have been incorporated into the real aims of the Polish justice system or whether they remain no more than a pipe dream.

Indywidualna ocena potrzeb a oczekiwania pokrzywdzonych

Indywidualna ocena służąca ustaleniu szczególnych potrzeb ofiar przestępstw w zakresie ochrony / redakcja naukowa Lidia Mazowiecka. Warszawa : LEX a Wolters Kluwer business, 2015, s. 123-145.

Przybysze ze Wschodu w pracowniczej matni

Rzeczpospolita 2015, nr 53.

Współautorstwo: Mazurczak, Karolina

Przestępstwo nielegalnego przekroczenia granicy w ujęciu historycznym, teoretycznym i praktycznym

Archiwum Kryminologii 2015, t. XXXVII, s. 191-222.

Współautorstwo: Woźniakowska, Dagmara

Historical analysis of the issue of illegal crossings of national borders shows that theinstruments of criminal law reactions are more characteristic for totalitarian countriesthan democratic ones. In the case of Poland, over the course of the last few decadesa substantial change has taken place in the goal of protecting borders. Until the endof the 1980s, attempting to prevent its own citizens from leaving was the priority,while now the border controls are concentrated on stopping citizens from third-worldcountries entering.The offence stipulated in article 264 paragraph 2 of the Criminal Code penalises anact involving perpetrators illegally crossing Polish borders and do so by using specifiedforms of actions in the form of deceit, violence, threats or in co-operation with otherpeople. Awareness of the perpetrator in relation to the eventual location of the bordermust be based on their knowledge in this field. Here it should refer to normalisedpatterns and the so-called good model citizen, who should possess knowledge bothrelated to cultural norms and to certain facts (e.g. the layout of Poland’s borders). Thismodel is well enough confirmed in the case of Polish citizens. But it is harder to applydirectly to foreigners, specifically those coming from another cultural background.Due to this, determining the guilt of foreigners when it comes to committing crimeson the territory of our country relies on checking and accounting for the concretepersonal facts of the perpetrator, specifically their level of familiarity with Polish legaland socio-cultural norms, while taking into consideration their education, nationalorigin, profession, etc. A lack of appropriate awareness about the perpetrator, resultingfrom a lack of proper knowledge and information, would be the same as making anerror about the factual or legal meaning of the act. The effect of such an error wouldbe an inability to assign intentional fault to the perpetrator for committing the givenact. From 1 July 2015, in agreement with article 28 paragraph 1 of the Criminal Code,a person who remains in justified error about the circumstances constituting thehallmarks of a criminal act, has not committed a crime at all.The authors of the article draw attention to the most commonly occurring forms ofactivities by perpetrators from article 264 paragraph 2 of the Criminal Code, namely theillegal crossing of borders in co-operation with other people. This co-operation must beunderstood as various forms of collaboration between various people while committinga crime, often fulfilling various roles in this procedure. There is little to dispute the factthat responsibility for this will be assumed by an appropriate accomplice, and thereforethe agreement of several people in relation to the shared committing of a crime. Toconclude, all parties must have awareness that other people will be participating incommitting the crime, and articulate their will (intention) in the joint action. A lack ofagreement in this sense would therefore exclude any collaboration.From a procedural point of view, for an illegal border crossing to qualify as a crime,and not a misdemeanour, the fact must be proven that the accused crossed the border “in co-operation with other people”. In the opinion of the article’s authors, withoutproof of such circumstances, one cannot talk about a crime being committed at all. Perusal of court records raises objections about how this provision is being used inpractice. In none of the analysed recorded situations did border controls attempt toprove the circumstances of co-operation as a reasonable premise for accepting a groupcrossing the border. In some cases, the issue seems questionable.It is clear that the Polish state, in the name of its own interests, tries to ensure theflow of migrants is legal and controlled. But doubt from the article’s authors inspiresmaking use of the instruments of criminal law to aid this goal. Punishments, whichmight be placed upon perpetrators of illegal border crossing crimes, do not play a rolein most cases. One cannot speak about retaliation (because it is not an act which wouldarouse any social emotions and demand retaliation), nor speak about the resocialisationof perpetrators (since it is hard to treat the fact of crossing a border as violatingfundamental social values, and moreover the perpetrator is a foreigner and it is not inthe interest of the Polish state to reintroduce them to society but to expel them fromthe republic’s territory). Finally, it seems fruitless to argue about the preventative roleof punishments, since this perfectly serves the administration’s reaction (in the formof the practice of using detention and expulsion from institutions as well as a ban fromentering Poland’s territory).The position that it is not necessary to launch criminal proceedings againstthose people smuggled across the border was expressed in the so-called Declarationfrom Doha accepted in 2015, issued as a summary of the 13th UN Congress. In itsverdicts, the EU Court of Justice draws attentions to how it is inappropriate to imposepunishments on illegally-residing third world citizens that deprive their freedom solelyon the grounds that they have stayed without a valid reason in the territory of that state,contravening orders to leave that territory in a specified timeframe.In relation to the above, it is the belief of the authors that a justified recommendationwould be to withdraw from the frequently-used article 264 paragraph 2 of the Criminal Code, so that proceedings can be conducted in cases related to the illegal crossing ofborders.

The relationship between poverty, social exclusion and criminality

Criminality and criminal justice in contemporary Poland : sociopolitical perspectives / by Konrad Buczkowski, Beata Czarnecka-Dzialuk, Witold Klaus, Anna Kossowska, Irena Rzeplinska, Paulina Wiktorska, Dagmara Wozniakowska-Fajst, Dobrochna Wójcik (Institute of Law Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland). Farnham ; Burlington, VT : Ashgate Publishing, 2015, s. 51-72.

Preventing criminality : the social policy of preventing social exclusion

Criminality and criminal justice in contemporary Poland : sociopolitical perspectives / by Konrad Buczkowski, Beata Czarnecka-Dzialuk, Witold Klaus, Anna Kossowska, Irena Rzeplinska, Paulina Wiktorska, Dagmara Wozniakowska-Fajst, Dobrochna Wójcik (Institute of Law Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland). Farnham ; Burlington, VT : Ashgate Publishing, 2015, s. 73-92.

The social perception of criminality

Współautorstwo: Rzeplińska, Irena; Woźniakowska, Dagmara

Criminality and criminal justice in contemporary Poland : sociopolitical perspectives / by Konrad Buczkowski, Beata Czarnecka-Dzialuk, Witold Klaus, Anna Kossowska, Irena Rzeplinska, Paulina Wiktorska, Dagmara Wozniakowska-Fajst, Dobrochna Wójcik (Institute of Law Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland). Farnham ; Burlington, VT : Ashgate Publishing, 2015, s. 145-158.

Redakcja:

Zwalczanie i zapobieganie nielegalnej migracji

Współredaktorstwo: Perkowska, Magdalena; Jakubaszek, Andrzej; Makarska, Małgorzata

[Kraków] : Krajowa Szkoła Sądownictwa i Prokuratury, [2015]

ISBN 9788394317218

[4], 102 strony.

Data wyd. wg BNPol online.

Miejsce wyd. wg bazy e-ISBN.

Na okł. nazwa projektu: "Szkolenie kadr wymiaru sprawiedliwości i prokuratury w zakresie zwalczania i zapobiegania przestępczości transgranicznej i zorganizowanej".

U góry okł.: Norway grants.

Protecting Women against Violence : A Global Challenge

Współautorstwo: Woźniakowska, Dagmara

Femicide : Targeting of Women in Conflict a Global Issue that Demands Action. Vol. 3 / Andrada Filip, Michael Platzer (eds.) – Vienna: Academic Council on the United Nations System, 2015, s. 83-88.

A woman’s right to freedom from violence is a political and social issue. Whether, and if so, in what ways, violence against women is perceived as a serious problem varies from one cultural region to another. How seriously this issue is treated mostly depends on the status of women in the given society. It is societies that determine which actions constitute this type of violence, how law enforcement agencies respond and how much support the victim can expect. This last factor does not just refer to support from law enforcement agencies but also from near and distant family and friends. The identity of the aggressor is likewise a cultural issue. There can only be one intimate partner in smaller families, but there are more people who can inflict violence in more extended multi-generational families (and older women may be among the perpetrators). The different status of women, and consequently their protection from violence, is strongly associated with historical and religious factors. The place of women in society is not only different in different parts of the world, it can vary considerably in a given region.