GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works Faculty Scholarship 2020 The Price of Prevention: Anti-Terrorism Pre-Crime Measures and International Human Rights Law, Arturo J. Carrillo George Washington University Law School,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.gwu.edu/faculty_publications Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation Arturo J. Carrillo, The Price of Prevention: Anti-Terrorism Pre-Crime Measures and International Human Rights Law, 60 Va. J. Int’l L. 571 (2020) This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Scholarship at Scholarly Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works by an authorized administrator of Scholarly Commons. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. ARTICLE The Price of Prevention: Anti-Terrorism Pre-Crime Measures and International Human Rights Law ARTURO J. CARRILLO* How far can law go to prevent violent acts of terrorism from happening? This Article examines the response by a number of Western democratic States to that question. These States have enacted special legal mechanisms that can be called ‘anti-terrorist pre-crime measures.’ Anti-terrorist pre-crime measures, or ATPCMs for short, are conditions or restrictions imposed on a person by law enforcement authorities as the outcome of a legal process set up to identify and neutralize potential sources of terrorist activity before it occurs. The issue is whether the ATCPMs regimes in existence today comply with the corresponding States’ international obligations under human rights law because, by virtue of their preventative mission, these regimes operate outside, or on the fringes of, the ordinary criminal justice systems in the democratic societies that deploy them.