Magister Legum - LLM / In 20 the years after the genocide that afflicted Rwanda, the country has made considerable progress towards developing human resources in the public sector. It has kick-started its economy and improved sectors such as public health and education. There is still a need to attract direct foreign investment to boost the economy even further. However, Rwanda needs to take precautionary measures to ensure that it does not fall prey to economic criminality which will impede its economic progress. The fact of the matter is that young transitional democracies are prone to attract economic delinquents who take advantage of loopholes in the law to advance their criminal goals. This is particularly so in a country such as Rwanda, where the government has to prioritise other pressing needs that must be addressed. This paper assesses the extent to which Rwanda is prepared to deal with the menace of money laundering, a threat that may well stunt its ambitions to build a strong economy.

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Magister Legum - LLM / Political lobbying is a recent and widespread phenomenon that arises in countries where many big and economically important companies are located. It is a relatively new phenomenon and the term 'lobbying' has featured in political science literature only since the 1990s.¹ Lobbying groups are ubiquitous and are located in the centres of competence where political decision-making takes place.² One can distinguish two main aims of lobbying: lobbying for a government contract (Beschaffungslobbyismus) and lobbying with regard to laws (Gesetzeslobbyismus).³ The focus of this paper is on the latter. It is concerned to analyse how lobbyists influence the lawmaking process and what the consequences are for society. Lobbying is the influence on decision makers and decision-making processes through the provision of information.⁴ Politicians need information to contribute to ministerial or 1 parliamentary discussions and for their decisions in elections and votes. They often do not have the capacity to collect enough information. That is when the lobbying groups become important. They provide the politicians with information needed and thus ensure that their point of view ends up in the draft law and later in the law.⁵ There is also lobbying in the private sector. Representatives of the pharmaceutical industry, for instance, try to influence doctors by giving them free specimens and computer programmes, paying for education workshops and other benefits with the aim that the doctors prescribe the products of the pharmaceutical companies.⁶ To analyse this aspect of lobbying as well would exceed the scope of this paper and will not be attempted. An interesting aspect is that lobbying has become more integrated and international. Lobbyists do not work exclusively in their countries of origin. In the EU it is as important to lobby decision makers in the European institutions as to lobby them in the national institutions because a significant part of politics is decided now in Brussels.⁷ Furthermore, lobbyists from different countries meet to harmonise their lobbying strategies. In Brussels, for example, American and German lobbyists meet regarding restrictive export rules into the US and the EU. The American Chamber of Commerce (AMCHAM) is an American interest group that works in Brussels to ensure the effective representation of US businesses in Europe.⁸ Nevertheless, the national level remains important for lobbyists. The policy of the EU relies always on national policy and through the Council of Ministers - as the most powerful part of the EU - national interests are represented strongly in Brussels. Directives, moreover, have to be implemented on a national level. One can see that national lobbying is also an important tool to influence European policy.⁹ The scope of this paper, however, is to shed light on lobbying activities in the Federal Republic of Germany. Therefore, lobbying in the EU will play a lesser role.

No / The ubiquity of the ICT and the Internet has made them integral to our daily lives in the past two decades, bringing numerous benefits and the risks of victimisation from various cybercrimes, including cyber harassment and cyberstalking. Stalking is generally understood as unwanted or unsolicited persistent and continuous following, pursuing, contacting, spying, harassing, threatening the victim, and causing fear and apprehension. Unfortunately, given the seriousness of cyberstalking and its severe and traumatic impacts on the victims, the existence of the law and any legal protection for victims remains elusive and vague in the Malaysian legal landscape for decades until August this year.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

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This thesis is an enquiry into the regulation of immigration through criminal law and its institutions. It looks at the range of immigration offences in British legislation, and whether and how they are being used in practice. The criminalisation of immigration status has historically served functions of exclusion and control against those who defy the state’s powers over its territory and population. In the last two decades, the prerogatives to exclude and punish have been enhanced by the expansion of the catalogue of immigration offences and the more systematic enforcement of these powers. The great reliance on the criminal law to regulate immigration is distinctive of a period in which crime and immigration have been increasingly politicised. As a consequence, more offences have been created and more individuals have been subject to the hybrid immigration and criminal justice system. While immigration offences largely remain under-enforced, some of them –particularly those penalising document fraud and identity stripping- are used against foreign nationals who cannot be removed from the country. In this thesis I explain what I consider to be the most pernicious consequences of this expansion of formal and substantive criminalisation of immigration breaches. The existence of a parallel system of sanctions allows enforcement agencies wide margins of discretion. Therefore, similar cases may be dealt with in very different ways. When the criminal route is chosen, the use of criminal law in the vast majority of cases reaching the criminal courts is unnecessary, disproportionate and extremely harmful. Both the decision to prosecute and the sanction eventually imposed are justified by preventive and regulatory purposes. The actual practice of criminalisation reveals that the criminal procedural safeguards are weakened and those accused of immigration crimes are likely to be convicted and imprisoned for these offences. I conclude that the formal and substantive criminalisation of immigration represents a departure from liberal criminal law principles and the purposes of criminal punishment. These conclusions cast doubts about the pragmatic, non-principled use of criminal law to regulate immigration flows, and call for the need to look at other, more humane alternatives in the treatment of ‘unwelcome’ migrants.

Which uses of the power to criminalise are misuses of that power? When, in other words, is an exercise of the power to create a criminal offence an exercise of that power which cannot be morally justified? This thesis seeks to provide one part of the answer, by addressing an aspect of the question little discussed by criminal law theorists. Thus it seeks not classes of conduct which it is impermissible to criminalise, nor classes of objective which offence-creators cannot permissibly pursue. Rather the thesis addresses the distinct issue of means – of how criminal offences (are set up to) bring about their creators’ objectives. It asks which means of achieving objectives it is impermissible to employ or make available, and how the power to criminalise must be used to avoid their employment or availability. In answering these questions the thesis distinguishes a number of types of criminal offence, by reference to the means by which the tokens of each (are set up to) achieve objectives. The argument is that to create tokens of these types is often to misuse power, because it is often to employ, or make available, impermissible means. This judgment of impermissibility is a function of a number of principles of political morality, some of which are developed at length in the course of the thesis. No single principle (or set of principles) is presented as an absolute limit on the power to criminalise; but each is part of a complete picture of how that power can permissibly be used, and contributes to vindicating the thesis defended within these pages. That thesis, to repeat, is that some uses of criminalisation are no better than misuses, on account of the means by which the resulting offences (are set up to) achieve their creators’ ends.

This thesis critically assesses the scope and method of criminalisation of the concept of fraud under the Fraud Act 2006 through the discussion of an apparent ‘duality’ between (co-existing) criminal and non-criminal resolution mechanisms. The reader will find social sciences theory and mixed-methods research techniques being used to identify and characterise a dysfunction between legislation and the social function of fraud control and its resolution. The 2006 Act appears to present a categorical and monolithic headline offence of fraud qualified by dishonesty, yet it is not clear that the Act clearly identifies the scope of effective criminalisation with respect to fraud. The dishonesty-based conduct offence provided in the Fraud Act 2006 is examined in the context of contemporary theory and practical considerations that relate to the discipline of law-enforcement. This work investigates pre-industrial modes of fraud resolution and identifies industrial-era points of divergence between the concepts of fraud and theft (a similar headline offence defined and criminalised under the Theft Act 1968). The work also offers an empirical study of survey-based data collection involving one-hundred-and-forty participants (N=140). It measured the practical extent of criminalisation of fraud in terms of participant indications of the (typically) most likely official outcome in response to sixteen hypothetical examples of fraud offences. The survey results appear to support practical, contextual, and theoretical considerations from the literature on the inhibitors to the consistent application of a conduct-based general fraud offence. The data and findings highlight the advantages of detailed actus reus-based criminalisation of types of fraud that require additional control through effective criminalisation.