Ten years after Juan Bustos Ramírez’s (1935-2008) death this short post explores the highlights of his career. The author, an avid disciple, illustrates the greatness of Bustos’s achievements as an academic, politician and human rights lawyer in spite of the difficult historical and personal circumstances in which he worked.
At a seminar co-organised on 23th-24th August 2018 in Santiago (Chile) by the Alberto Hurtado University and the Universidad de Chile to mark the 10th anniversary of the death of Juan Bustos Ramírez (1935-2008), one of his former students recalls an episode that took place in one of Bustos’s Santiago lectures in 1996. This serves as a starting point for reflection on the extraordinary personality of the Chilean criminal law scholar, who had been one of Hans Welzel’s followers in Bonn and later became a distinguished professor at the Universitat Autónoma of Barcelona.
The report presented at the conference held in Venice to commemorate Joachim Vogel immediately after his death is herewith proposed again with some updates and additions. The work focuses on Vogel's writings on European criminal law, which highlight the attention of the author both for theoretical problems and for the practical aspects underlying the process of Europeanisation of criminal law. In particular, his studies on the various possible forms of integration between national systems, his adherence to a European criminal science of a syncretistic nature, his interest in all aspects of criminal harmonisation fostered by the European Union are recalled. Five years after the tragic event, Vogel's ability to understand the criminal problems arising from the process of European integration and even to foresee those currently on the table is all the more evident.