Datensatz

Zusammenfassung

Cultural diversity and its impact on law and legal practices can be analyzed from several different perspectives: descriptive, comparative, and normative. Legal sociology, anthropology, and criminology examine how cultural diversity develops and how it impacts criminal behaviour, cultural justifications of such behaviour, and reactions by criminal justice systems, for instance, sentence severity. A legal comparative approach would map how various legal systems respond to challenges that appear in multicultural environments. Neither the descriptive nor the legal comparative perspective will be taken in this chapter. Instead, the focus will be on foundational normative questions that can and need to be asked independent of the positive criminal law in a given legal system: How should legislatures and courts respond to increasing cultural diversity? After discussing general principles for criminalization (Sect. 2), the author will take up two examples: whether defamation of religions should be a criminal offense (Sect. 3) and how to evaluate the seriousness of so-called honor killings and killings in the context of blood feuds (Sect. 4).