"Organized crime" and "terrorism" are so different phenomena as the history presented? The attacks of September '01 have already led the United Nations to draw attention to the logistical connections between those criminal networks.
Crime with economic purposes as well as that with ideological goal threaten the values and fundamental principles on which our democracies are based.
Measured in western democratic values, all criminal networks are violent, but the strategy of violence differs across cultures, historical circumstances and fluctuating circumstances, and getting thus more or less occult or radiant.
The intensity of the violence, measured across the extent of the damage to the integrity of people and goods or across the magnitude of its subversion’s impact, is to be qualified, in democratic penal law, as aggravating circumstance. Such approach allows to identify and qualify those acts aimed at creating or maintaining terror in order to modify all or part of the constitutional order inside our internal legal system
Hence the importance for our democracies not to deviate from this mode of doing, even to fight terrorism, just not to undermine their own legitimacy.
Co-author : Myrianne Coen & Vincenzo Macri
