Kin punishment is the practice of punishing the family members of someone who is accused of committing a crime, either in place of or in addition to the perpetrator of the crime. It refers to the principle in which a family shares responsibility for a crime which is committed by one of its members, and it is a form of collective punishment. Kin punishment has been used as a form of extortion, harassment, and persecution by authoritarian and totalitarian states. Kin punishment has been practiced historically in Nazi Germany, China, Japan and South Korea, and presently in North Korea.
Traditional Irish law required the payment of a tribute ( Éraic ) in reparation for murder or other major crimes. In the case of homicide, if the attacker fled, the fine had to be paid by the tribe to which he belonged. [1]
In medieval Welsh law, the kin of an offender was liable to make compensation for his wrongful act. This penalty (called Galanas ) was generally limited to murder. [2]
The medieval Polish Główszczyzna fine functioned similarly to the Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian weregild.
Traditional Arab society, which is clan-based, strongly adheres to the concept of collective responsibility. Bedouins recognize two main forms of penalty for a crime against a member. These are blood revenge, referred to as Qisas (قصا, "revenge") and blood money, Diyya (دية, "blood money"/"ransom"). In cases of severe crimes such as murder and rape, blood revenge is the prescribed punishment. If a murder occurs, clansmen of the victim have the right to kill the murderer or one of his male clansmen with impunity. Certain crimes justify multiple acts of revenge, for example, the murder of women and children is avenged fourfold. Crimes considered treacherous, such as the murder of a guest, are also avenged fourfold.[ citation needed ]
Alternatively, a crime punishable by blood revenge can be commuted to a severe fine if the family of the offended party agrees to it. Blood money is paid jointly by the clan of the offending member to the clan of the victimized member. Bedouins differentiate between crimes in which the group must pay as a standing obligation without reimbursement from the perpetrator of the offense, and crimes where the latter must reimburse them. Crimes where the clan is obligated to pay a joint fee without any reimbursement are murder, violent assault, or insults and other offenses committed during a violent conflict. The collective payment of fines for such crimes is viewed as a justified contribution to the welfare of the injured party rather than a penalty to the perpetrator. Other offenses given a blood-price are crimes against property and crimes against honor. [3] Concepts based on the Arabian laws of blood revenge and blood money are found in Islamic Sharia law, and are thus variously adhered to in Islamic states.[ citation needed ]
China historically adhered to the concept of liability among blood relatives. During the Qin and Han dynasties, families were subject to various punishments according to the punishment of the offending member. When the offense was punishable by death by severing the body at the waist, the offender's parents, siblings, spouse, and children were executed. When the offense was punishable by death and public display of the body, the offender's family was subject to imprisonment with hard labor. When the offender's sentence was exile, their kin was exiled along with them. [4] The most severe punishment, given for capital offenses, was the Nine familial exterminations (zú zhū (族誅), literally "family execution", and miè zú (灭族/滅族)), implemented by tyrannical rulers. This punishment entailed the execution of all the close and extended kin of the individual, categorized into nine groups: four generations of the paternal line, three from the maternal line, and two from the wife's. In the case of Confucian scholar Fang Xiaoru, his students and peers were uniquely included as a tenth group.[ citation needed ]
During the Ming dynasty of China (1368–1644), 16 palace women attempted to assassinate the Jiajing Emperor. All were sentenced to death by slow slicing. Ten members of the women's families were also beheaded, while a further 20 were enslaved and gifted to ministers. Collective punishment was officially repealed by the government of the Qing dynasty (1644–1912) in 1905. [5]
In traditional Germanic law, the law of Germanic peoples (before the widespread adoption of Roman canon law) accepted that the clan of a criminal was liable for offenses committed by one of its members. In Nazi Germany, this concept was revived so that the relatives of persons accused of crimes against the state, including desertion, were held responsible for those crimes. [6] [7]
Numerous testimonies of North Korean defectors confirm the practice of kin punishment (연좌제, yeonjwaje literally "association system") in North Korea, under which three generations of a political offender's family can be summarily imprisoned or executed. [8] Such punishment is based on internal Workers' Party protocols and lies outside of the formal legal system. [9] The association system was introduced with the North Korean state's founding in 1948, having previously existed under the Joseon kingdom. [8] A yeonjwaje system in South Korea, which oppressed and sometimes tortured relatives of defectors and abductees to the north, was abolished in the 1990s following the June Democratic Struggle. [10]
The Israeli government's use of home demolition within territories occupied in 1967 was condemned as collective punishment on account that the homes of militants are often family homes. As a result of internal and international pressure against the practice an appeals process against demolition was established in 1989, and consequently the number of demolitions declined. However, in subsequent periods of violence the house demolition policy has been frequently employed as a deterrent against Palestinians. [11] [12] In an effort to stop suicide bombings during the Second Intifada, the Supreme Court of Israel in July 2002 accepted the legality of expelling family members of suspected terrorists from the West Bank to the Gaza Strip if they were found to have abetted their activities. They argued that it was not a general deterrent because it limited the use of expulsion to cases where "that person, by his own deeds, constitutes a danger to security of the state." [13] Expulsion to Gaza was discontinued after Israel's unilateral disengagement from the Gaza Strip.[ citation needed ]
The Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Venezuela concluded in a September 2021 report that Venezuelan security and intelligence agents reportedly applied the principle of Sippenhaftung , using methods including and kidnapping and detention of relatives of critics, real or perceived, to accomplish arrests. [14] [15] [16] [17] [18]
Murder is the unlawful killing of another human without justification or valid excuse committed with the necessary intention as defined by the law in a specific jurisdiction. This state of mind may, depending upon the jurisdiction, distinguish murder from other forms of unlawful homicide, such as manslaughter. Manslaughter is killing committed in the absence of malice, such as in the case of voluntary manslaughter brought about by reasonable provocation, or diminished capacity. Involuntary manslaughter, where it is recognized, is a killing that lacks all but the most attenuated guilty intent, recklessness.
Vigilantism is the act of preventing, investigating and punishing perceived offenses and crimes without legal authority.
Punishment, commonly, is the imposition of an undesirable or unpleasant outcome upon a group or individual, meted out by an authority—in contexts ranging from child discipline to criminal law—as a response and deterrent to a particular action or behavior that is deemed undesirable or unacceptable. It is, however, possible to distinguish between various different understandings of what punishment is.
Retributive justice is a legal punishment that requires the offender to receive a punishment for a crime proportional or similar to its offense.
In the United States, habitual offender laws have been implemented since at least 1952, and are part of the United States Justice Department's Anti-Violence Strategy. These laws require a person who is convicted of an offense and who has one or two other previous serious convictions to serve a mandatory life sentence in prison, with or without parole depending on the jurisdiction. The purpose of the laws is to drastically increase the punishment of those who continue to commit offenses after being convicted of one or two serious crimes.
Blood money, also called bloodwit, is money or some sort of compensation paid by an offender or their family group to the family or kin group of the victim.
In law, a sentence is the punishment for a crime ordered by a trial court after conviction in a criminal procedure, normally at the conclusion of a trial. A sentence may consist of imprisonment, a fine, or other sanctions. Sentences for multiple crimes may be a concurrent sentence, where sentences of imprisonment are all served together at the same time, or a consecutive sentence, in which the period of imprisonment is the sum of all sentences served one after the other. Additional sentences include intermediate, which allows an inmate to be free for about 8 hours a day for work purposes; determinate, which is fixed on a number of days, months, or years; and indeterminate or bifurcated, which mandates the minimum period be served in an institutional setting such as a prison followed by street time period of parole, supervised release or probation until the total sentence is completed.
Collective responsibility refers to responsibilities of organizations, groups and societies. Collective responsibility in the form of collective punishment is often used as a disciplinary measure in closed institutions, e.g. boarding schools, military units, prisons, psychiatric facilities, etc. The effectiveness and severity of this measure may vary greatly, but it often breeds distrust and isolation among their members. Historically, collective punishment is a sign of authoritarian tendencies in the institution or its home society.
In traditional Albanian culture, Gjakmarrja or hakmarrja ("revenge") is the social obligation to kill an offender or a member of their family in order to salvage one's honor. This practice is generally seen as in line with the social code known as the Canon of Lekë Dukagjini or simply the Kanun. The code was originally a "a non-religious code that was used by Muslims and Christians alike."
Sippenhaft or Sippenhaftung is a German term for the idea that a family or clan shares the responsibility for a crime or act committed by one of its members, justifying collective punishment. As a legal principle, it was derived from Germanic law in the Middle Ages, usually in the form of fines and compensations. It was adopted by Nazi Germany to justify the punishment of kin for the offence of a family member. Punishment often involved imprisonment and execution, and was applied to relatives of the conspirators of the failed 1944 bomb plot to assassinate Hitler.
Goel, in the Hebrew Bible and the rabbinical tradition, is a person who, as the nearest relative of someone, is charged with the duty of restoring that person's rights and avenging wrongs done to him or her. One duty of the goel was to redeem a relative who had been sold into slavery. Another was to avenge the death of a relative who had been wrongly killed; one carrying out this vengeance was known as the goel hadam, commonly translated to English as "avenger of blood."
Collective punishment is a punishment or sanction imposed on a group for acts allegedly perpetrated by a member of that group, which could be an ethnic or political group, or just the family, friends and neighbors of the perpetrator. Because individuals who are not responsible for the acts are targeted, collective punishment is not compatible with the basic principle of individual responsibility. The punished group may often have no direct association with the perpetrator other than living in the same area and can not be assumed to exercise control over the perpetrator's actions. Collective punishment is prohibited by treaty in both international and non-international armed conflicts, more specifically Common Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention and Article 4 of the Additional Protocol II.
In the United States, the law for murder varies by jurisdiction. In many US jurisdictions there is a hierarchy of acts, known collectively as homicide, of which first-degree murder and felony murder are the most serious, followed by second-degree murder and, in a few states, third-degree murder, which in other states is divided into voluntary manslaughter, and involuntary manslaughter such as reckless homicide and negligent homicide, which are the least serious, and ending finally in justifiable homicide, which is not a crime. However, because there are at least 52 relevant jurisdictions, each with its own criminal code, this is a considerable simplification.
Eladio Loizaga Caballero is a Paraguayan lawyer and diplomat.
The nine familial exterminations, nine kinship exterminations, or execution of nine relations, also known by the names zuzhu and miezu, was the most severe punishment for a capital offense in premodern China, Korea, and Vietnam. A collective form of kin punishment typically associated with offenses such as treason, the punishment involved the execution of all relatives of an individual, which were categorized into nine groups. Nine exterminations were often done by slow slicing. The occurrence of this punishment was somewhat rare, with relatively few sentences recorded throughout history.
Rafael Ramón Acosta Arévalo was a Venezuelan military officer with the rank of corvette captain of the Venezuela Navy. Acosta Arévalo was victim of forced disappearance and tortured by agents of the General Directorate of Military Counterintelligence (DGCIM) during his detention after being accused by the government of Nicolás Maduro of "conspiring to carry out an attempted coup d'état". Acosta Arévalo died as a result of injuries suffered after being tortured while in detention in the Military Hospital of the Army Dr. Vicente Salias Sanoja. The news of his death caused great impact in the media and the condemnation of both national and international authorities.
The Constitutional Law Against Hatred, for Peaceful Coexistence and Tolerance, also known simply as the Law Against Hatred, is a law passed unanimously by the Venezuelan Constituent National Assembly and published in Gaceta Oficial 41,274 on 8 November 2017.
François Patrick Nogueira Gouveia is a Brazilian murderer serving three life sentences plus 25 years in Spain for the murders of his aunt, uncle, and two infant cousins in Pioz, Castilla–La Mancha on 17 August 2016.
French criminal law is "the set of legal rules that govern the State's response to offenses and offenders". It is one of the branches of the juridical system of the French Republic. The field of criminal law is defined as a sector of French law, and is a combination of public and private law, insofar as it punishes private behavior on behalf of society as a whole. Its function is to define, categorize, prevent, and punish criminal offenses committed by a person, whether a natural person or a legal person. In this sense it is of a punitive nature, as opposed to civil law in France, which settles disputes between individuals, or administrative law which deals with issues between individuals and government.
Fernando José Báez Sosa, an 18-year old Argentine law student, was beaten to death at the Le Brique nightclub in Villa Gesell, Buenos Aires Province, on 18 January 2020 by a group of eight rugby players from Zárate, Buenos Aires. The case attracted significant nationwide media attention due to the violent nature of the crime and the extensive footage spread on social media. The murder has also been dubbed by Argentine media as the crime of the rugbiers and the crime of Villa Gesell.
Un acusado de participar en la Operación Gedeón dijo al Tribunal de Control en su audiencia preliminar que agentes de la Dgcim lo torturaron y le dijeron que aplicarían el 'Sippenhaft', una táctica de castigo colectivo utilizada por los nazis.
En el caso de un acusado de participar en la Operación Gedeón (una incursión marítima en mayo de 2020), relató que en su audiencia preliminar, agentes de la Dirección General de Contrainteligencia Militar (DGCIM) "lo torturaron y le dijeron que aplicarían el Sippenhaft (una táctica de castigo colectivo utilizada por los nazis)".
Además, dijo al Tribunal de Control que, tras negarse a hacer las declaraciones que le plantearon, los funcionarios le dijeron que aplicarían el Sippenhaft.
Un acusado de participar en la Operación Gedeón dijo al Tribunal de Control en su audiencia preliminar que agentes de la DGCIM lo torturaron y le dijeron que aplicarían el 'Sippenhaft'. Detuvieron posteriormente a sus hermanas y a su cuñado
He told the Control Court that after refusing to make declarations posed to him during the interrogation session, the DGCIM members told him they would apply 'Sippenhaft' (a collective punishment tactic used by the Nazis), involving the imprisonment of his relatives as a form of pressure.
