Redefining Criminal Law AI, Migration and Cross-Border Challenges
A Special Issue of Laws (ISSN 2075-471X).
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 March 2027 | Viewed by 488
Editors
Interests: EU criminal law; refugee law; human rights
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
This Special Issue will bring together a selection of contributions at the intersection of three of the most pressing challenges facing criminal law today: the rise of artificial intelligence, the governance of human migration and asylum, and the increasingly complex demands of cross-border legal cooperation. Taken together, these phenomena are reshaping the contours of criminal law, enforcement, and justice.
The rise in AI-driven technologies, from predictive policing to autonomous decision-making in investigative and prosecutorial contexts, raises fundamental questions about agency, accountability, and the rule of law. At the same time, migration and asylum are increasingly governed by criminal norms. The criminalisation of migration-related conduct, the prosecution of those who facilitate irregular movement whether for profit or out of solidarity, and the use of criminal law as an instrument of border enforcement have all attracted intense scholarly debate. The contributions gathered in this Special Issue will engage critically with these developments.
Finally, cutting across both themes is the challenge of cross-border cooperation. Criminal activity does not respect national boundaries. Yet criminal law remains, in its essential structure, a creature of the nation-state. The tension between the push to retain the control of criminal law competences and the transnational character of contemporary crime creates persistent difficulties for investigation, prosecution, evidence-gathering, and enforcement. This Special Issue will consider how states are facing this dichotomy, particularly in the European sphere.
This Special Issue aims to compile contributions that are diverse in their methodological approaches and outlook, drawing on insights from criminal law, legal theory, migration and refugee law, and public international law/EU Law.
Overall, we hope this Special Issue will serve as an invitation to rethink, and where necessary to redefine, the boundaries of criminal law in an age of artificial intelligence, mass mobility, and global interdependence.
Dr. Cristina Sáenz Pérez
Dr. Alessandra Michela De Tommaso
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
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Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- criminal law
- migration
- EU law
- artificial intelligence
- transnational law
- asylum
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