General tendencies of criminal law and penal policy in Yugoslavia (1945–1990s)

The chapter traces the development of criminal law and penal policy in the former Yugoslavia after the Second World War, to account for the specificity of this region which showed many progressive tendencies compared to other communist states. To do so, the chapter examines these issues within three frameworks: historical development, constitutional framework, and the role of academic study of criminal law and criminology. First, the chapter describes the impact of the 1951 political rift between Yugoslavia and the USSR on the domain of criminal law, which consisted in rejecting the ideological, “Soviet” model of criminal law and adopting a more moderate, rights-based model. Second, the chapter explains the impact of the changing constitutional setting after the adoption of the last constitution of Yugoslavia in 1974, which paved the way for a more substantive autonomy of constituent regions. This set the regions on the road to independent development of criminal law and penal policy, aligning with their specificities, subsequent to Yugoslavia&s;s dissolution during the 1990s. Finally, the chapter emphasizes the importance of the relative independence and regional decentralisation of the academic study of crime and punishment in Yugoslavia for providing the intellectual basis for the post-Yugoslav processes of state-building and democratisation.