Fundamental Rights and Legal Consequences of Criminal Conviction

The legal position of convicted offenders is complex, as are the social consequences that can result from a criminal conviction. After they have served their sentences, custodial or not, convicted offenders often continue to be subject to numerous restrictions, in many cases indefinitely, due to their criminal conviction. In short, criminal convictions can have adverse legal consequences that may affect convicted offenders in several aspects of their lives.

In turn, these legal consequences can have broader social consequences. Legal consequences are often not formally part of the criminal law, but are regulated by different areas of law, such as administrative law, constitutional law, labour law, civil law, and immigration law. For this reason, they are often obscured from judges as well as from defendants and their legal representatives in the courtroom.

The breadth, severity and longevity and often hidden nature of these restrictions raises the question of whether offenders' fundamental rights are sufficiently protected. This book explores the nature and extent of the legal consequences of criminal convictions in Europe, Australia and the USA. It addresses the following questions: What legal consequences can a criminal conviction have? How do these consequences affect convicted offenders? And how can and should these consequences be limited by law?

“This crucially important collection explores and exposes the diverse, damaging and mostly hidden legal consequences of criminal conviction. Contributions from leading scholars across many jurisdictions challenge and extend our conception of what both punishment and rehabilitation entail and require. This book deserves to be read widely - and to be used to re-shape policy and practice.” – Fergus McNeill, Professor of Criminology and Social Work, University of Glasgow.,

“Such is the pernicious and powerful impact of the criminal conviction that many former prisoners will say that the hardest part of their sentence was being released into the community. This pioneering compendium provides a first-of-its-kind overview of these often overlooked legal and extralegal consequences of criminal records across Europe. Its publication should be a major wake-up call both for academia but also legal systems across the continent, if we are serious about supporting reintegration and human rights.” – Shadd Maruna, Professor of Criminology, Queen's University Belfast,