Details

The Baltic Criminological Seminar had been established in 1987 by a group of criminologists from Leningrad (later St. Petersburg), Moscow, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, with an aim of exchanging opinions that had been ‘non-traditional’ for a Soviet official mainstream. Prof. Y.Gilinsky, G.Zabryansky, V.Kogan, A.Yakovlev (all from Russia), D.Seps (Latvia), Y.Bluvstain, S.Boskholov, V.Justitsky (all from Lithuania), A.Leps, E.Raska (Estonia) had been among the organizers of the first seminar session.

All had agreed that the seminar should have been annual and have taken place in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Leningrad (St. Petersburg) consecutively. Thus, fourth (in 1990), eighth (in 1994), twelfth (in 1999), and sixteenth (in 2003) seminars were held in Leningrad-St. Petersburg.

            A political situation was changing, Baltic republics became independent but the seminar was going on and expanding, attracting more and more participants from Europe and North America.

            Papers of most seminar sessions were published.

            Since 1991, the Baltic Criminological Seminar became international. Not only due to the independence of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia but also due to joining Baltic region states (Germany, Norway, Poland, Finland, Sweden) and other countries (Great Britain, Hungary, USA, Check Republic, Switzerland, etc.) – later.

            The International Baltic Seminar is proud of such prominent criminologists’ participation as professorsIan Taylor (Great Britain), Nils Christy (Norway), Kauka Aromaa (Finland), Manfred Brusten (Germany), Klaus Sessar (Germany), Fritz Sack (Germany), Jerzy Jasinski (Poland), Monika Platek (Poland), Jerzy Sarnecki (Sweden), Louise Shelley (USA) etc.

            Maintaining professional and personal connections between criminologists from Latvia, Lithuania, Russia, Estonia is another and not lesser the seminar’s contribution.

            The twentieth (anniversary) International Baltic Criminological Seminar session should take place in St. Petersburg on June 29- July 1, 2007, with the subject ‘Crime and Deviance in the Changing World. Session languages will be English and Russian. That session, as well as all previous ones, aims to join criminologists from the Baltic region, which contributes, in the long run, to strengthening not only professional, but also political, economic, cultural relations between countries-participants of the Seminar. All the more so because the Seminar concerns are general issues of organized crime, human trafficking, human rights.

            Right now the Organizing Committee of the Seminar got letters of confirmation from Norway (Prof. N. Christy), Germany (Prof. H. Kury), Hungary (Prof. Ferenc Irk), France (Prof. T. Gilly), Poland (Prof. M. Platek) and many colleagues from Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia expressed their intentions to participate in the forthcoming session in the course of the last session of the International Baltic Criminological Seminar (November 27-28, 2006, Vilnius, Lithuania).

 Organizers: Sociological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS), Russian State Pedagogical University, Saint-Petersburg Law Institute of the Prosecutor-General of the Russian Federation’s Office.

Chair of the Organizing Committee, Doctor of Law, Prof.

Yakov Gilinskiy