This research project, called “Aporophobia and criminal law”, is directed by Ana Isabel Pérez Cepeda (University of Salamanca). Besides, the funding body is the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (Reference: RTI2018-095155-B-C21).
This coordinated project has two research lines: manifestations of aporophobic criminal system and lege ferenda proposals. The second line aims to improve a criminal policy of social justice.
Furthermore, the duration is from 2019 to 2021.
The relevance of this project is the new approach. In fact, the aporophobic criminal system is analysed from a criminological, legal, comparative and interdisciplinary methodology.
What is the main objective of this coordinated project?
The fundamental objective of this project is to analyze the treatment granted by current Criminal Law and Criminal Policy to people excluded from the political, social and economic system in order to develop proposals for improvement. This objective can be broken down into three necessarily interrelated:
- Deepen the study of the ideological bases that sustain the Criminal Law of aporophobia. In a preliminary way, these bases have been identified in the postulates of radical functionalism, managerialism and punitivism, so these three currents will be studied, without prejudice to the fact that others are identified during the investigation. The purpose of this objective is to offer a critique of such ideological bases and to promote a return to doctrinal currents of a guaranteeist nature and respectful of the legitimizing principles of criminal law in a social and democratic State of Law.
- Identify and analyze the manifestations of the Criminal Law of aporophobia in current legislation. The coordinated project will focus mainly on Spanish legislation, although special attention will be paid to the same phenomenon in other European and Latin American countries where its presence is evident. For this, it has experts in criminal discipline from Spain, Germany, Holland, Italy, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba and Uruguay. These manifestations have been initially identified, and the study will focus on them, in what will be called the criminal law of the excluded, which is specified in the criminalization of trifles, the criminalization of immigration (crimmigration) and the criminalization of drug dealing, behaviors that they are usually carried out by those marginalized by the system.
- Offer alternatives and proposals de lege ferenda for the construction of a model of social justice. It is intended to design a new legislative framework so that the current social State of Law not only does not criminalize the excluded, but protects them against the attacks that they may receive directly or indirectly, precisely because of their condition as such.
In this sense, the legislative reform proposals will focus fundamentally on two aspects: decriminalization of some conducts due to their null or low harmfulness (or alternatively, incorporation of formulas that allow reducing the legal-criminal consequence of certain criminal offenses), and modification of criminal legislation to offer greater protection to those excluded from the behaviors of which they are usually victims (attacks on labor rights, attacks related to hate speech, gender attacks, etc.)