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Project

Punishment and policy-transfer.

In this project we will focus on questions of implementation and variation. It has often been noted that follow-up to judgments by the ECHR has not always been satisfactory and that the Committee of Ministers, the body that supervises this process, has not been particularly firm when confronting national authorities. This has been referred to as the ‘implementation gap’ (Anagnostou 2013). In recent years also the CPT has repeatedly expressed its concerns about insufficient or lack of follow-up to its recommendations. In one of its recent annual reports the CPT makes for example the following observation: ‘…the failure of States to implement recommendations repeatedly made by the CPT on certain issues remains a constant refrain of the Committee’s reports. Few countries visited over the last twelve months have escaped this criticism’ (CPT 2008: para 16). Such critiques have been voiced on multiple occasions, both in annual reports as well as in individual country reports (Daems 2016). Such observations on the effectiveness – or the lack thereof – of the ECHR and the CPT do prompt questions on what factors facilitate or, alternatively, obstruct implementation of European penal policy ‘from above’.

Date:1 Jan 2014 →  31 Dec 2017
Keywords:policy-transfer, Punishment
Disciplines:Criminology