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RAIMO LAHTI The programmes of the seminars were oriented towards traditional comparison of legal cultures and solutions, i.e., our cooperation was directed to comparative criminal law and criminal justice. A clear change in the orientation of FinnishHungarian cooperation took place from the 1990s. It had to do with the collapse of the “Iron Curtain” in 1989 and the following political-economic changes in Europe and globally as well as the emergence of legal development which has often been described by the expression “Europeanization and internationalization of criminal law”. In the 2000s the general themes of the seminars were fully in accordance with the new priorities. The rapid development towards an international criminal law and European criminal law since the 1990s compelled to reassess the role of comparative criminal law and to pay attention to the intensified interaction between regional and international (or global) legal regulations on one hand, and the national legal orders, on the other.* The total reform of Finnish criminal law was in fact implemented by partial legislative packages in 1980—2003°. The penal thinking which was adopted in this total reform (recodification) can be characterized by the demand for a more rational criminal justice system: i.e., for an efficient, just and humane criminal justice. The penal system must be both rational as to its goals (utility) and rational as to its basic values (justice. humaneness). An important effect of the new criminal and sanction policy can be seen in the reduced use of custodial sentences in Finland. Since the mid-1970s, the relative number of offenders sentenced to unconditional imprisonment was on the decrease until 1999: from 118 in 1976 to 65 in 1999 per 100 000 population and to the level of the other Nordic countries. At the same time the development of registered criminality signed a similar trend in all of Nordic countries, so that a dramatic cut in the prisoner rate in Finland did not result in a proportionate increase in the incidence of crime compared with other Nordic countries, where the prisoner rate stayed quite stable.’ * See Lahti, Homage to Imre A. Wiener, 22-24. The revised Finnish Penal Code with the amendments up to 766/2015 is electronically accessible as an unofficial translation into English from the website of the Ministry of Justice: https://www.finlex.fi/fi/laki/kaannokset/1889/en18890039_20150766.pdf. ° In more detail, see Raimo Lahti, Recodifying the Finnish Criminal Code of 1889: Towards a More Efficient, Just and Humane Criminal Law, Israel Law Review 27 (1993), 100-117; idem, Towards a Rational and Humane Criminal Policy — Trends in Scandinavian Penal Thinking, Journal of Scandinavian Studies in Criminology and Crime Prevention 1 (2000), 141-155. See also the article collections Raimo Lahti, Zur Kriminal- und Strafrechtspolitik des 21. Jahrhunderts, Berlin, de Gruyter, 2019; idem, Towards an Efficient, Just and Humane Criminal Justice, Helsinki, Finnish Lawyers’ Association, 2021. In more detail, see Patrik Tornudd, Fifteen Years of Decreasing Prisoner Rates in Finland, Helsinki, National Research Institute of Legal Policy (NRILP), 1993; Tapio Lappi-Seppala, Regulating the Prison Population, Helsinki, NRILP, 1998. + 398 +
