The Logic of the Report Wolfenden Committee, Permissibility or Crime Evasion

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Phd Student of Criminal Law and Criminology, Faculty of Law, Theology and Political Science, Science and Research Branch, Islamic Azad University,Tehran,Iran

2 Assistant Professor, Department of Criminal Law and Criminology, Faculty of Humanities, Shahed University, Tehran, Iran (Corresponding Author)

3 Assistant Professor, Department of Criminal Law and Criminology, Faculty of Law and Political Science , Allameh Tabatabai University, Tehran, Iran

4 , Assistante Professor, Department of Criminal Law and Criminology, Faculty of Law, Theology and Political Science, Science and Research Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

The legal effect of the Wolfenden Committee's proposals was to reduce the limitation of criminalization, that is, to decriminalize some immoral acts that actually had a religious basis. But what was the message of this retreat from criminal law is important, especially because of the discussed issues that were related to the field of ethics and the meaning of ethics. So, if decriminalization contains a prescriptive and affirmative meaning, then it should be stated that the mentioned committee was a permissive and a center for the justification and spread of immorality, while if it was evasive and its body and text lacked moral value compared to decriminalized examples, then with a discussion outside the field of morality is faced, and it can be said that decriminalization is not the same as permissibility of those actions. Based on the extra-legal approach in this research, it was investigated that there are important sociological and logical dimensions behind the legal outcome of the committee. So that the social and moral changes of the society, the change of values and the prominence of issues such as personal privacy and on the other hand the emphasis of the rules of legal ethics on duty and virtue, not right (harm) ultimately lead to the conclusion that criminal law is neither logically nor practically capable of providing for morality and the committee, by maintaining a neutral position and without moral value judgement, took a way of escaping from criminal law, and considered the real task of criminal law to deal with public manifestations of corruption, and therefore, by separating the two types of crime and guilt, he pointed out that crime evasion and Determining the limitation of criminalization in cases related to moral advocacy is not logically equal and comparable to the permissibility of immoral actions, at the same time, this logic can govern other criminalization systems as well.

Keywords

References

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Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology
Volume 11, Issue 22
March 2024
Pages 157-186

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