Contribution à l'étude de la notion de crime organisé en Europe: L'exemple de la France et de la Grèce

The presented study examines the juridical, socio-political and epistemological implications,
caused by the insertion of the concept of organised crime into the European penal legislations,
precisely the French and Greek ones. Firstly, the study concerns the process by which the preexistent legal notions concerning criminal participation and group-based offenses have
gradually been replaced by an allegedly univocal notion of organised crime, as well as the
consequences of this substitution for the concerned juridical systems. This study of the “sein” of
contemporary policy towards organised crime, invites us to think also about its “sollen”. The
serious legal-dogmatic problems and the semantic entropy inherent to the concept, combined
with the justified worries about the politico-philosophical orientations of contemporary criminal
policy systems, lead us to rethink not only the utility of the juridicisation of a concept which is ontologically inappropriate for scientific treatment, but also the latent manichean tendencies behind this process; tendencies which, much more than organised crime itself, threaten the declared values of our societies and our justice systems.