The jurisdictional scope of Soviet criminal law

How WIDELY OR NARROWLY a regime chooses to stretch the limits of its criminal law mandate says much about its outlook on the international environment and what deference it elects to afford the claim here staked out by other members of the world community. A status quo minded leadership will tend to play the game conservatively in the sense of asking for itself the same array of rights and immunities that it is prepared to grant the rest of the company. By contrast, a radical entrant is apt to behave confrontationally and strive to indulge his own preferences at the expense of the treatment to which his fellow states think they are equally entitled. The Soviet record in this matter attracts attention for three reasons. First, the performance offers a classic example of how the ebb and flow of revolutionary fervour found reflection in the successive modes of drawing the boundaries of the nation's criminal law beat. Second, the Soviet Union and its self-appointed heirs have in recent years evinced a growing interest in entering into cooperative ventures with other states for the purposes of mutual procurement of legal assistance. In the field of criminal law, these projects entail, inter alia, traffic in criminal offenders with the object of furthering the effective administration of justice by the parties. The format of rendition services sought and supplied between states is expected to match the compass of the jurisdictional writ fixed by the respective domestic legal canon. A state does not ordinarily bother to bid for the extradition of an individual if, once in possession of the de cuius, the workings of its own law estop the latter's prosecution. Nothing would be accomplished by the exercise, except, of course, waste of time, energy and money. By the same token, the decision to surrender an alleged malefactor to another state is substantively affected by whether or not the person can be tried by the host state and that opportunity, too, hinges on the designated contours of the local legal system's theatre of operations. Third, the constitutional crisis which brought the USSR to an end has set the stage for an overhaul of the old pattern of relations between the constituent republics and the topic of how they will divide the estate and each then propose to run its share of the business among themselves and in the global marketplace ranks high on their current agenda

Criminal law · Criminology · Ideology · Political science · Politics · Scope (computer science · Sociology · Computer Science · Law · Wildlife Conservation and Criminology Analyses

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