Prof. Dr. ADELA ASUA BATARRITA

Terrorism and freedom of expression

Prof. Dr. Mª LUISA CUERDA ARNAU
So-called jihadist terrorism represents a global threat to human rights from a dual perspective. On the one hand, organizations and criminal groups indiscriminately attack people and States with hitherto unknown criminal tactics. On the other hand, even the most consolidated democracies decide to tackle this new challenge with strategies which, in many cases, unacceptably defer internationally recognized rights and freedoms. This paper will address the latest penal reforms in the Spanish Criminal Code on terrorism introduced by Organic Law 2/2015. The priority objective is to demonstrate that they have been promoted from the most blatant populism, they have been implemented outside of a rigorous evaluation of their effectiveness, as well as to show that, as a whole, they reveal a deep aversion to guarantees. What is even more serious is that citizens begin to internalize that individual rights can take a back seat when speaking of national security, a disturbing and deliberately ambiguous concept in which almost everything has a place. Given this reality, it is imperative that democratic societies recover the conviction that human rights are the lifeblood of a peaceful, fair and supportive coexistence.

The impending threat of Islamist terrorism and how to confront it through policing. A legal-penal analysis of the extreme hypothesis: shoot to kill

Prof. Dr. MIGUEL ÁNGEL CANO PAÑOS
Islamist terrorism presents a series of characteristics that diverge enormously from traditional terrorism, of an ethno-nationalist or socio-revolutionary nature; characteristics that can be summarised in two relevant standpoints: first, the adoption by terrorists of a broad concept of enemy, with no distinction between direct or indirect victims. Second, the totally unpredictable nature of their actions which, in many cases due to their suicidal nature, make it possible to change the modus operandi in a relatively short span of time. These circumstances mean that police forces find themselves faced with an omnipresent, ubiquitous and unpredictable threat. A threat which means that the use of so-called «direct coercion» in situations of grave danger, including the use of firearms to neutralise an action which is considered exceptional, result in the destruction of human life, even if it is the presumed terrorist. Examples such as those that occurred in Catalonia in the last two years vindicate this situation. On the basis of these assumptions, the aim of the talk is to analyse, from a criminological and, especially, a legal-penal point of view, the exercise of violence by police forces to supress extremely dangerous situations in the context of the threat posed by Islamist terrorism.