Throughout its historical development, criminal justice has evolved from a punishment-centered system toward more humane and reconstructive approaches. The purpose of this study is to explain the role and functions of restorative justice in this transformation and to examine its capacity in advancing dejudicialization policies within the contemporary criminal justice system. Within the theoretical framework, restorative justice is introduced as an alternative model to the classical punitive system, seeking to shift the focus from punishing the offender toward restoring social relations, compensating the victim’s losses, and promoting community participation in conflict resolution. The research method is descriptive–analytical, based on documentary analysis and conceptual interpretation of historical and criminological texts. Data were collected from both domestic and comparative criminal law sources and interpreted through a theoretical inference method. The findings indicate that restorative justice, through mechanisms such as mediation, arbitration, and voluntary compensation, can not only reduce judicial interventions but also perform diverse legal and social functions in rebuilding public trust and alleviating the burden on the criminal justice system. Accordingly, restorative justice should not merely be viewed as a substitute for punishment but as an evolutionary stage in the transformation of the concept of criminal justice toward dejudicialization.

This article aims to analyze efforts to prevent the crime of murder within the family environment from a criminological perspective and to examine criminal responsibility and punishment imposed on perpetrators. The problem is focused on the occurrence of murder cases within the family environment in North Sumatra Province and the factors contributing to these crimes, based on seven reported cases from online media news between 2021 and 2024. In order to approach this problem, criminological theory and criminal law theory are used as the theoretical references to understand the causes of crime and the application of criminal liability. The data is collected through a normative-empirical legal research method, including literature studies, analysis of statutory regulations such as the Criminal Code (KUHP), Law Number 23 of 2004 concerning the Elimination of Domestic Violence, Law Number 1 of 2023, and the examination of relevant online media reports, and analyzed qualitatively. This study concludes that efforts to prevent the crime of murder in the family can be carried out through penal and non-penal approaches. Penal efforts emphasize the enforcement of criminal sanctions, while non-penal efforts focus on preventive measures through education, strengthening family resilience, the role of religious institutions, police involvement, and psychological assistance. The causative factors include emotional instability, parenting patterns, economic pressure, social environment, and weak law enforcement. Effective prevention requires cross-sectoral collaboration to create a just, preventive, and sustainable crime prevention system, while punishment serves both retributive and rehabilitative purposes.

This article argues that much of the persistent ambiguity surrounding the discussion about the justification of punishment results from an unnoticed conflation of descriptive, normative, and conceptual questions within the so-called theories of punishment. Such conflation, it is suggested, produces a confusion of analytical levels, as illustrated by the position advanced by Zaffaroni, Alagia, and Slokar in their Manual de Derecho Penal. Building on this diagnosis, the article proposes a methodological alternative inspired by Ronald Dworkin’s theory of interpretation. It contends that the philosopher of criminal law should approach the practice of punishment in a manner analogous to the way Dworkin’s judge approaches the law. This interpretive approach offers a coherent framework for addressing some of the recurrent tensions identified in the penal theory literature.

The prison system of the Kingdom of Poland was characterised by inhumane living conditions. This article discusses the situation of prisoners and the legal regulations in force at the time, including the “Penal Code” of 1818 and the later “Code of Principal and Correctional Punishments”, modelled on the Russian criminal code of 1845. The text outlines attempted reforms within the penal system and presents efforts aimed at the rehabilitation of both adult and juvenile offenders. It also highlights legal provisions concerning prison healthcare and the overall sanitary conditions in correctional facilities.

Abstract For many kinds of crimes, it is natural to expect that the criminal wrongdoing at issue should be understood (at least partly) in terms of the criminal having wronged the victim. However, it is notoriously difficult to square this expectation with the mainstream understanding of criminal law duties as ‘monadic’ or non-directed ones. In this paper, I suggest a relational interpretation of the relevant duties in the criminal law that accommodates the natural idea that criminal censure and punishment sometimes respond to a wronging of the victim. The interpretation posits an ‘embedded’ relational structure, where the wrongdoer’s directed obligation vis-à-vis the individual victim not to, e.g., injure her is supplemented by a directed obligation vis-à-vis the political community not to violate the former directed obligation.

ABSTRACT It is unclear how victims with different neurodevelopmental disorders (NDD), whose characteristics may be perceived in similar ways, are viewed by laypeople when they are victims of different criminal offenses. Further, given the impact of essentialist beliefs on propensity to display prejudice, we contend that trait essentialism is an important individual difference to assess. A 4 (Victim Disability: None, Autism Spectrum Disorder, Down Syndrome, Fetal Alcohol Syndrome) x 3 (Crime Type: Physical Assault, Sexual Assault, Robbery) design was employed. Participants (N = 568; 65.50% female) were recruited online. The dependent variables of interest were amount of blame assigned to the victim and support for various goals of punishment for the perpetrator. Findings demonstrate that victim disability and crime type, as well as participants’ trait essentialism, do impact assignment of blame to the victim as well as influence support for punishing the perpetrator. Implications and future directions are discussed.

Criminal acts of corruption are very detrimental to state finances or the country's economy and hinder national development, so they must be eradicated in order to create a just and prosperous society based on Pancasila and the 1945 Constitution of the Republic of Indonesia. Criminal acts of corruption that have occurred are widespread, not only detrimental to state finances, but also a violation of the social and economic rights of society at large.Corruption has become very widespread and has penetrated systemically into all sectors at various central and regional levels in all state institutions, both executive, legislative and judicial. Therefore, the criminal act of corruption is a class of extraordinary crime, so that its eradication must be carried out with extraordinary measures (extraordinary measures), as well as using extraordinary legal instruments (extraordinary instruments).Corruption cases in Indonesia are public consumption which can be obtained through various mass media, both print and electronic. Hardly a day goes by without news about corruption cases. The Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) revealed that criminal acts of corruption have had extraordinary consequences in various aspects of people's lives, such as high poverty rates, unemployment, increasing foreign debt, and natural damage.According to the Central Statistics Agency (BPS), Indonesia has experienced its lowest point in terms of poverty percentage since 1999, namely 9.82 percent in March 2018. With a poverty percentage of 9.82 percent, the number of poor people or those whose monthly per capita expenditure is below The poverty line reaches 25.95 million people. When compared with the previous period, namely September 2017, the poverty percentage was recorded at 10.12 percent or the equivalent of 26.58 million poor people in Indonesia.1Even though this figure shows a decrease from the previous year, the level of social welfare and the number of poor people is still quite large. As an effort to overcome criminal acts of corruption which are included in the category of extraordinary crimes, legislators formulated several important things, which are considered to be able to be used as tools to ensnare and have a deterrent effect on perpetrators, namely the principle of reverse evidence and heavy sanctions, including criminal penalties.

The relevance of this paper lies in the interplay between accounting policies and legal ethics, which remains at the forefront of contemporary discretionary accounting practices and the attendant earnings management. The paper's quest for understanding the legal consequences is relevant for corporate managers and investors, as it provides insight into the consequences of exceeding the boundaries of allowed accounting discretion, which brings regulatory oversight to the illegality of deceitful management of corporate earnings. Accordingly, the purpose of this paper is to analyse the legal repercussions of corporate engagement in earnings management. It also aims to investigate the causative factors of managerial engagement in earnings management and to develop a framework for the phenomenon. The methodological approach focused on critical reviews and the application of doctrinal and comparative research methods to analyze related documents, including those from regulatory bodies, associated cases, and published journal articles, employing a thematic framework. The results show, on the one hand, that earnings management beyond policy limits may result in financial fraud and/or filing deceits, and that such actions could attract various legal enforcement consequences, including fines, penalties, job loss, company closures, and imprisonment, among others. On the other hand, the results also indicate that corporate management may be lured into illegal earnings management primarily to promote the company's financial outlook and to serve management's economic interests. The paper presents some promising avenues for further research. Such a future could explore the different levels of legal consequences when management exploits accounting policy loopholes, mainly to deceive investors into believing that the company is financially buoyant, versus the legal repercussions when such exploitation is primarily for management's self-financial gain, such as in earnings management and tunneling engagements. A comparison of regional differences in earnings management and differences in legal consequences could offer investors insights into which regions have more substantial legal repercussions and, therefore, stronger deterrents for managers to engage in earnings management

International legal regulation of the illegal use of trademarks plays a key role in the protection of intellectual property rights. Despite the existing problems, such as differences in national legislation and insufficient international cooperation, there are real ways to solve them. Harmonization of legislation, enhanced cooperation and the use of modern technologies can significantly improve the effectiveness of the fight against counterfeiting, contributing to the protection of the interests of copyright holders and ensuring fair competition in the global market. In this article, the authors explore the key international legal mechanisms aimed at combating the illegal use of trademarks. They also examine the key issues and propose possible solutions. Particular emphasis is placed on criminal liability for the unlawful use of trademarks in both CIS member states and several countries adhering to the continental legal system (such as Lithuania, Spain, and Italy). The authors conclude that intellectual property protection in the Republic of Kazakhstan is grounded in a modern legal framework that aligns with international standards. Nevertheless, to enhance the effectiveness of law enforcement, additional steps are required, including increasing the awareness of parties involved in legal relations, strengthening criminal and administrative penalties, and expanding international cooperation.

Legal Judgment Prediction (LJP) is a crucial task in the field of legal artificial intelligence. It leverages the fact description of a case to automatically render a verdict, deriving judgment results (including legal articles, charges, and penalty terms). Current LJP methods are overly simplistic in integrating legal articles and charge definitions into case fact representations, neglecting attention to key legal elements information such as legal concepts and terminology, resulting in the omission of key legal elements. Simultaneously, they overlook the sentencing range information contained in legal articles, often leading to judgment results that exceed the statutory penalty terms. In light of this, we propose a novel LJP method—TA-LJP (Term-Aware Legal Judgment Prediction). This method effectively fuses legal articles (or charge definitions) with case fact representations step by step through an improved multi-level fusion module, enhancing the weights of key legal elements to highlight their modeling and effectively extracting sentencing range information from legal articles to further strengthen case fact representations, thereby improving the overall performance of the LJP task. TA-LJP consists of three main stages: Firstly, to fully model key legal elements when integrating legal articles and charge definitions into fact representations, legal articles (or charge definitions) are incrementally integrated through an improved multi-level fusion module, finely increasing the weights of key legal elements to initially enhance case fact representations. Subsequently, sentencing range information from legal articles is extracted and effectively utilized to further strengthen case fact representations. Finally, the enhanced fact representations are used to predict the legal articles, charges, and penalty terms of the case. Experimental results on LAIC2021 datasets demonstrate that TA-LJP exhibits distinct advantages in LJP, particularly in the penalty term prediction task, achieving a relative improvement of 3.02% compared to the best baseline method.

A historical and comparative study of the criminal punishment system, its types, and the practice of applying the corresponding sanctions provides the foundation for further development of the key aspects of penalization for offenses violating traffic regulations and vehicle operation rules. Understanding modern penal policy is impos-sible without understanding preexisting legal sources and criminal law doctrines. Given that legislative and ju-dicial penalization is in a process of evolution, further modernization of criminal liability for traffic offenses cannot be effectively implemented without a comprehensive study and analysis of the main periods of penal policy for these offenses. One such period is the emergence of traffic regulation and the formation of penal policy in Russia, which dates back to the mid-18th to early 20th centuries. Accordingly, the aim of this paper is to examine the formation and development of approaches to penalization of offenses related to traffic violations and vehicle operation rules. The primary objective was to analyze criminal penalties and the content of sanc-tions in the provisions stipulating liability for traffic offenses contained in the Code of Criminal and Correctional Penalties of 1845, the Charter on Penalties Imposed by Justices of the Peace of 1864, the Criminal Code of 1903, and imperial decrees. The study utilized general methods – analysis, synthesis, deduction, and a specific scientific approach – comparative analysis, which ensured objective results through historical comparison and contrast. This resulted in an explanation for the intensity of penalization associated with the partial tightening of sanctions from the mid-18th to the early 20th centuries, driven by the proliferation (accessibility) of vehicles, as well as the increase in their numbers, and the state’s need to ensure proper public order and safety.

This study aims to analyze the punishment of child criminals in the Indonesian juvenile justice system and to assess the balance between child protection and punishment as a form of criminal accountability. The research method used is normative juridical research with analytical descriptive specifications, which focuses on the study of legal norms, legal principles, and the concept of child punishment in legislation. The data used is secondary data consisting of primary legal materials and secondary legal materials obtained through literature studies. The data is analyzed using qualitative analysis techniques, namely by interpreting and explaining the applicable legal provisions with the practice of child punishment. The results of the study indicate that although the juvenile justice system in Indonesia has normatively placed the protection and best interests of children as the main principle, in practice, punishment still tends to be oriented towards punishment through imprisonment. This approach has the potential to have a negative impact on child development and hinder the process of rehabilitation and social reintegration. This study concludes that the punishment of child criminal offenses should be placed as a last resort and directed towards a more proportional, humanistic approach, oriented towards training and recovery without ignoring the interests of justice for victims and society.

Before making a decision on criminalizing a deed, which entails more serious negative consequences for a person than other violations, the increased harmfulness of the deed in question must be considered. However, criminal liability, due to its intractable repressive impact and cost capacity, is justifiable only if the ultima ratio principle is observed, namely, if the undesirable deed cannot be prevented by alternative means with equal efficiency. The article explains the origin, content, and significance of the ultima ratio principle in the modern criminal law system, which limits the legislator’s powers to criminalize. Although the role of the legislator’s political considerations in both determining the harmfulness of the deed and choosing measures to combat it cannot be eliminated, the ultima ratio principle as a specific criminal law related element of the principle of proportionality, universally recognized as a general principle of law, must be observed in formulating the corpus delicti in the Criminal Law, taking into account that the application of any criminal punishment is a restriction of human rights.

ABSTRACT This essay critically examines whether ethical naturalization – understood as the grounding of moral inquiry in empirical sciences – can resolve enduring normative disputes. Focusing specifically on the conflict between retributivist and consequentialist justifications of punishment, we investigate whether naturalistic approaches (drawing on evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral economics), in addition to explaining the origins and persistence of moral intuitions and practices, can also justify their normative authority. Scientific naturalists seek to reduce or replace normative ethics with descriptive accounts, often deploying evolutionary debunking arguments to challenge moral realism. Liberal naturalists, by contrast, integrate empirical insights without eliminating irreducible normativity. Through analysis of punishment theories, this article argues that, while naturalization sheds light on the evolutionary roots of retributive intuitions (e.g. adaptive cooperation mechanisms) and highlights neuroscientific challenges to free will, thus reinforcing consequentialist explanations, it nevertheless fails to adjudicate which theory is morally superior, since empirical explanations do not bridge the is-ought gap (Hume’s problem). The resulting stalemate highlights naturalization’s explanatory adequacy but normative insufficiency. The essay concludes by advocating a pluralistic integration in line with liberal naturalism, where science informs, but does not replace, philosophical reflection on ethical justification.

The development of digital technology has facilitated the distribution of pornographic content through social media, creating new challenges for criminal law enforcement. This phenomenon demands adaptive and proportional criminal policies based on contemporary criminal law principles and the provisions of Law Number 44 of 2008 concerning Pornography. The problem faced is how to regulate criminal policies for perpetrators of the distribution of digital pornographic content through social media in Indonesia and how to construct criminal policies for the distribution of digital pornographic content through social media in Indonesia. The research method used in this study is normative juridical legal research. The results of the study indicate that the regulation of criminal policies for perpetrators of the distribution of digital pornographic content through social media in Indonesia is regulated in Law Number 44 of 2008 concerning Pornography and supported by the Information and Electronic Transactions (ITE) Law, but its implementation still requires harmonization to be more effective and adaptive to developments in digital technology. Meanwhile, the construction of criminal policies for the distribution of digital pornographic content needs to be directed towards a more comprehensive approach, by balancing aspects of law enforcement, protection of public morals, and the right to freedom of expression within the framework of contemporary criminal law.

This academic article is devoted to a comprehensive analysis of the relationship between sanctions-related legal relations and criminal liability for violating or circumventing sanctions imposed by Ukraine after the start of large-scale aggression by the Russian Federation. The author proceeds from the assumption that sanctions are effective only if there are criminal penalties for violating them. The critical importance of the right to appeal against restrictive measures is justified, as it not only serves as a means of protection for persons subject to sanctions, but also acts as an instrument for disciplining the authorities applying sanctions, ensuring the clarity, accuracy and validity of their decisions, which is a necessary condition for the legitimacy of sanctions policy as a whole. The article examines the provisions of the Criminal Code of Ukraine that are currently used to classify sanctions violations, draft legislative changes and Ukraine's obligations to implement the Directive (EU) 2024/1226, the principle of the temporal effect of sanctions acts and its impact on proving the elements of a criminal offence, European Union`s mechanisms for administrative and judicial appeals against sanctions, and their comparison with national mechanisms. The key result of the study is the identification of two types of legal facts that terminate sanction legal relations – rehabilitating and non-rehabilitating: the former are caused by the recognition of a sanctioning legal act as illegal or unconstitutional, which makes criminal prosecution impossible, and the latter are caused by the expiry of the sanction, as well as the voluntary repeal or amendment of the legal act by the subject of law-making activity, which do not affect the establishment of actus reus and criminal liability.

Abstract Joshua Greene and Jonathan Cohen predict that neuroscience’s growing predictive power will motivate anti-retributivist penal reform by amplifying our conviction that we lack free will. According to one agent-causal libertarian position, ACT libertarianism, we often exercise free will by satisfying the conditions that ACT, an agent-causal account of free will, posits for its exercise. This paper argues that, even if compatibilism is false, ACT’s account of free will implies that, for us, neuroscience’s growing predictive power is epistemically irrelevant to whether we have free will in the sense that it can provide us only unquantifiable epistemic risk regarding whether we have it. Since retributivism’s definitive tenet is that satisfying a criminal wrongdoer’s negative desert justifies legal punishment independently of any good consequences that might result, neuroscience’s growing predictive power cannot provide us any reason to implement anti-retributivist penal reform.

Japan and South Korea, two advanced East Asian nations with universal health coverage and similar demographic challenges, have developed markedly different emergency medical services (EMS) systems. Despite growing interest in international benchmarking, structured, comparative studies that yield policy-relevant insights remain limited. We conducted a multisource comparative health-systems analysis using statutory laws, government publications, academic society reports, peer-reviewed literature, and national statistics. Key domains included EMS governance, workforce, prehospital organization, hospital-based emergency care, legal obligations for EMS patient transport and hospital acceptance, and governance and quality assurance mechanisms. Data were synthesized in comparative tables and narrative summaries to highlight structural and operational differences. Japan's EMS operates under decentralized municipal control through 722 fire departments, serving 4,100 designated emergency institutions with 6,139 board-certified emergency physicians. In 2023, over 6.64 million ambulance dispatches occurred, and 8.6% were classified as critical cases (1.3% death and 7.3% severe). Korea's EMS is centrally governed with 412 designated facilities in a tiered system and 2,464 specialists. Annual ambulance activations exceeded 3.5 million, with severe cases accounting for approximately 5% to 10%. Japan employs dual statutory frameworks (Fire Service Act and Medical Practitioners Act), allowing clinical discretion, whereas Korea enforces unified regulations with stricter obligations and criminal penalties for hospital refusal of emergency patients. The contrasting systems suggest that hybrid governance that combines centralized standard settings with local operational flexibility may optimize EMS performance. These findings provide lessons for EMS reform, cross-border collaboration, and disaster preparedness in high-income nations facing similar demographic and healthcare challenges.

Introduction: The debate between retributive and restorative justice remains a central issue in the politics of criminal law across jurisdictions. Indonesia and Georgia represent two countries undergoing legal transitions with distinct historical and socio-political contexts, yet both face similar challenges in determining the orientation of their penal policies. Purposes of the Research: This study aims to analyze the differences in the application of retributive and restorative penal theories within the criminal law policies of Indonesia and Georgia, as well as to identify the factors influencing these orientations. Methods of the Research: The research adopts a normative legal method with a comparative approach, examining statutory provisions, legal doctrines, and relevant judicial decisions. Results Main Findings of the Research: The findings reveal that Indonesia continues to rely on its colonial legacy through the Criminal Code, which predominantly reflects a retributive paradigm, while gradually incorporating restorative principles in specific legislation such as the Juvenile Criminal Justice System Law. Conversely, Georgia, which previously enforced an extreme zero tolerance policy rooted in a retributive approach, has shifted toward restorative justice within its juvenile justice system through the enactment of the Juvenile Justice Code of 2015. The novelty of this research lies in its comparative analysis, which uncovers how historical, cultural, political, socio-economic, and legal factors shape each country’s penal orientation. These findings contribute to the development of comparative criminal law scholarship and provide valuable insights for promoting more balanced penal policies that integrate both retributive and restorative justice.

On January 31, 2023, Health Canada granted British Columbia (BC) a three-year (2023-2026) exemption under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act (CDSA), decriminalizing the personal possession of up to 2.5g of certain unregulated drugs among adults (18+) without arrest, seizure of drugs, or criminal penalty. A key objective was to increase awareness, engagement, and retention in harm reduction (HR) and opioid agonist treatment (OAT) services by reducing stigma and enhancing service access. In May 2024, however, the policy was amended to re-criminalize drug use and possession in public spaces. This study examines how decriminalization and its subsequent amendment affected HR and OAT service operations from the perspective of service providers across BC. Between October 23rd, 2024 and January 29th, 2025, 18 semi-structured virtual key informant interviews were conducted with HR and OAT service providers across BC. The interviews examined participants' experiences with decriminalization and its amendment, and how these policy changes impacted service operations and delivery. Thematic analysis was used to identify patterns across interview data. Key informants reported few operational changes following decriminalization, with no major adjustments to service delivery. Despite expectations of increased client engagement, sites received no additional funding and faced ongoing staffing and resource shortages. Informants emphasized that systemic issues-such as the toxic drug supply and rising homelessness-had a greater impact on service use than the policy itself. A lack of clear communication and site-specific training resulted in uncertainty and confusion, further limiting frontline staff's ability to respond effectively to policy changes. Key informants perceived that decriminalization did not lead to immediate changes in HR and OAT site operations. Longstanding systemic barriers continued to limit service capacity and policy impact. Providers highlighted the need for sustained investment in housing, staffing, and supervised spaces to support meaningful engagement and reduce stigma. Addressing these foundational issues was seen as essential for realizing the policy's intended public health objectives.