FROM “THE TERRORIST” TO “THE RADICAL”: SUBJECTIVITY CRIMES IN THE SPANISH CRIMINAL CODE

Abstract

Since 2000 the successive Criminal Code reforms in the subject of terrorism have broadened the range of conducts which could be considered a terrorist crime. These reforms have pulled criminal justice way back along the chain of causality that, supposedly, may lead to an attack. That process has its greatest exponent in what we have come to call “terrorism subjectivity crimes”. In these crimes is not necessary to argue any objective relation between the individual who is being judged and the violence. It is only necessary to argue some kind of subjective link, a sort of ideological proximity, between the accused and the terrorism. These changes in terrorist crimes show a “preventivist” dynamic in the criminal fight against terrorism. Penal laws, which used to fight terrorists, are now fighting ‘radicals’. The radical is an individual who, according to the State, keeps some subjective contact with terrorism, thus becoming new “public enemy”.