ABSTRACT
This chapter sets out three paradigm treatments of human rights within academic Criminology, those of Manuel Lopez-Ray, Stan Cohen and Lucia Zedner, and show how they can throw light on contemporary theory and practice. Lopez-Ray was always alive to the necessity of ensuring that practical matters relating to criminal justice were dealt with fairly and with legal backing so as to ensure fair and humane treatment. Human rights are taking an increasingly prominent place in the criminal justice system and accordingly it features more and more in criminological theory. Cohen concerns about who is to be included in this process raises the spectre of the Nazi state and its systematic application of such criteria in the run up to the Holocaust. A coincidental facet of the temporal shift to pre-crime is that responsibility for security against risk falls not only to the State but extends to a larger panoply of individual, communal and private agents.
