Witness testimony has remained a central component of adjudication despite persistent concerns regarding its reliability. This article examines the historical regulation of witness testimony and its relevance to contemporary criminology and criminal justice. Rather than presenting legal history as a linear development, the article adopts a comparative approach focused on recurring safeguards against unreliable testimony, including corroboration, witness qualification, oath-taking, questioning, and sanctions for false evidence. Selected examples from ancient, medieval, and early modern legal traditions demonstrate that legal systems have long confronted problems involving deliberate fabrication, conflicting testimony, social status, coercion, and unequal allocation of testimonial credibility. The article then connects these historical concerns with contemporary research in law and psychology concerning memory distortion, suggestive questioning, weapon focus, cross-racial identification, eyewitness misidentification, expert evidence, and wrongful convictions. Particular attention is given to the distinction between deliberately false testimony and sincerely held but inaccurate recollection. The article further considers emerging evidentiary technologies, including blockchain-based evidentiary systems and facial recognition, with emphasis on reliability, bias, transparency, privacy, provenance, and accountability. The article argues that the historical evolution of witness testimony reveals a persistent tension between the necessity of testimony as a source of proof and the risks inherent in its production and interpretation. Historical legal systems developed procedural mechanisms to control those risks; contemporary criminology and psychology provide empirical explanations for why such risks arise and why traditional safeguards may sometimes be insufficient. Understanding this historical continuity can therefore strengthen contemporary criminal justice by encouraging critical assessment of evidence, appropriate corroboration, scientifically informed identification procedures, and greater attention to the prevention of wrongful convictions.
Human trafficking involving Indonesian Migrant Workers (PMI) is a transnational crime associated with irregular recruitment, migrant vulnerability, limited access to reliable information, and weaknesses in migration governance and institutional protection. This study examines the forms and processes of human trafficking involving Indonesian Migrant Workers, evaluates preventive and repressive legal protection mechanisms, and analyses the handling of trafficking from international law and criminological perspectives. The study employs a combined normative and empirical legal research approach. The normative analysis examines Indonesian legislation, including Law Number 21 of 2007 and Law Number 18 of 2017, together with the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, the Palermo Protocol, and the ASEAN Convention against Trafficking in Persons. The empirical component is based on face-to-face semi-structured interviews with two purposively selected institutional informants from KP2MI/BP3MI South Sulawesi conducted on June 22, 2026. The findings indicate that trafficking risks are associated with non-procedural migration, recruitment through social media and informal intermediaries, deceptive employment offers, documentation problems, unpaid wages, and difficulties in repatriation. Limited public awareness, insufficient outreach to remote communities, and weaknesses in institutional coordination may further reduce the effectiveness of protective controls. Although Indonesia’s legal framework is broadly aligned with international anti-trafficking standards, challenges remain in effective implementation, victim protection, recruitment monitoring, and cross-border cooperation. The study contributes by integrating international legal analysis with criminological perspectives on social control and victimization. Strengthening protection requires preventive community outreach, digital recruitment monitoring, victim-centred assistance, institutional coordination, and effective international cooperation.
This study aims to demonstrate that persons convicted and serving their sentence in a penal institution in Hungary are afforded the opportunity to exercise and live out their religion. The realization of this right is supported by an assortment of instruments and institutional arrangements; among these, the role of a prison chaplain being of particular and noteworthy significance. Overall, these mechanisms may contribute, not only to the effective enjoyment of freedom of religion and the practical opportunity of religious observance, but also to successful reintegration—namely, enabling a convicted person to re-enter and participate in the general community as a full member of society, and to be free from any stigma or undue labelling because of their past.
This article deals with the Brazilian penal system, which is seeing on the one hand attempts at ‘modernisation’ through the development of forensic technologies for genetic identification of prisoners, and on the other hand, the persistence of ‘archaic’ correctional institutions. Based on an ethnographic survey, this study analyses prison demographics in relation to the role played by the Brazilian DNA database, which both fails to exonerate convicts and is itself fostered by mass incarceration. It also focuses on the day-to-day procedures for collecting biological material from prisoners, which are often based on discretionary, arbitrary, and even illegal practices, thus establishing links between the permanent threat of prison violence and new genetic identification technologies. Through the sociological allegory of the ‘penal platypus’, it lays the groundwork for a reflection on the re-territorialisation of genetic profiling as it is taking place in Brazil.
Illicit trade hubs pose a significant challenge to global economies, undermining legitimate markets and fueling a range of criminal activities. Despite growing scholarly attention to illicit trade, limited research has examined the underlying conditions that enable illicit trade activities to agglomerate in particular hubs. This article reviews major analytical approaches relevant to understanding illicit trade agglomeration, drawing on insights from criminology, political economy, and economic geography. It argues that illicit trade agglomeration is driven by the interaction of three interconnected dimensions: political and institutional vulnerabilities, socioeconomic conditions, and infrastructure-related enabling environments. The interaction between these dimensions forms an ecosystem that facilitates illicit trade agglomeration and contributes to the emergence and persistence of illicit trade hubs. By conceptualizing illicit trade hubs as multidimensional ecosystems rather than isolated criminal hotspots, the review contributes to interdisciplinary debates on transnational crime, governance, and the spatial concentration of illicit economies.
