Anti-terrorism legislation

Anti-terrorism legislation are laws with the purpose of fighting terrorism. They usually, if not always, follow specific bombings or assassinations. Anti-terrorism legislation usually includes specific amendments allowing the state to bypass its own legislation when fighting terrorism-related crimes, under the grounds of necessity.

Because of this, suspension of regular procedure, such legislation is sometimes criticized as a form of lois scélérates which may unjustly repress all kinds of popular protests. Critics often allege that anti-terrorism legislation endangers democracy by creating a state of exception that allows authoritarian style of government.

At the end of the 19th century, Russia, Europe and the United States were confronted to a new radical movement which engaged in violent and illegal acts. This movement was first created in Tsarist Russia, where young intellectuals, sometimes staunch positivists, began to engage in a violent struggle against the Czar. Finding their influence in Nikolai Chernyshevsky's What Is To Be Done?, they began to advocate assassinations and bombings.

One of the first group, Zemlya y Volya (Land and Liberty), formed of upper-class professional revolutionaries, started armed struggle against the Czar's regime. Sergey Nechayev (1847–1882) would become one of the most famous figures of what quickly became known as a "Nihilist" movement, whose fate was described by Albert Camus in The Just Assassins (1949) — Camus would later write a thoroughly thought-out essay on existentialism rebellion and the use of violence in history in The Rebel (1951), which denounced both quietism and terrorism. Russian nihilists eventually succeeded in assassinating Alexander II in 1881.

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