Mehdi Khaghani - Ph. D. researcher in Criminal Law and Criminology School of Law, University of Qom, Iran

The huge wide-spread changes resulted from globalization, in particular the globalization of economy, the revolution of ICT technologies and the hegemony of critical social theory affecting the countries’ economic and legal policy making process, have altogether converted the issue of human rights into one of the most important challenges ahead of the global community. Human rights, as a discourse related both to ethics and law, includes such micro discourses as freedom, security, sustainable development, and respect for individual privacy. The turning point in the interaction between human rights and criminal law lies in securing the protection of humanistic norms through guaranteeing the enforcement of criminal sanctions. However, the risk of an expanded terrorism as emerging in the year 2001 has weakened the efficiency of the interaction of criminal law and human rights because due to the dominance of security-orienteddiscourse over the contemporary discourse of criminal laws by making use of methods aimed at fighting against terrorism such as the interception of citizens’ telephone dialogues or getting into their cyber privacy through intelligence services of countries actually been targeted by terrorism or those claiming to be terrorism victims, the human rights are continuously and severely deviated. This implies the replacement of protection patterns of criminal law in respect of human rights by the alternative annihilation atterns.The present paper will firstly deal with a description of characteristics and dimensions of modern criminal policies as adopted in fighting against terrorism not necessarily in legally totalitarian regimes and then, it will explain what increasing human rights barriers to exporting cryptography products (including hardware, software, and mere algorithms all aimed at increasing the citizens’ e-security against interception and hack systems) do exist in the laws and executive jurisprudence of the two sets of countries in question. The paper will end up in an assessment of the possibility of solutions proposed in returning the criminal law to its former status as protecting human rights.

Anti-terrorism strategy, exporting cryptography products, cyber privacy, victimization, human rights