Security policies and human rights in European football stadia

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This paper addresses the issue of the increasing infringement of European football supporters’ civil rights and liberties since the mid-1980s. The analysis of the national and supranational regulation of football hooliganism in the light of the evolution of crime control policies in Europe uncovers that this jeopardising of freedoms, owing to the institutionalisation of the control of deviance and to the blurring of the frontiers between the executive and the legislative powers, is not a side-effect of the counter-hooliganism policies. It is inherent to the very structure of the regulation of the phenomenon in that it stems from the rationale of the crime control patterns that frame it.