The Study Of The Definition Of The Conception Of Terrorist Organizations

As a main player of terrorism, terrorist organizations have become one of the biggest threaten to the international society. Making a scientific definition of terrorist organizations is the precondition of anti-terrorism & terrorist organizations, also the foundation of anti-terrorism legislation and international cooperation on anti-terrorism. Regrettingly, there was not a widely accepted conception of terrorist organizations by the international society till today. There is an article of the crime of organizing, guarding, and participating terrorist organizations in Criminal Law of China, but there is not a definition of terrorist organizations. It causes a negative influence on anti-terrorism. So, how to make a scientific conception of terrorist organizations, and complete our legislation on anti-terrorism, become an important basic work of our anti-terrorism war.There are three types of the conception of terrorist organizations in foreign laws, the formal conception, the essential conception, and the combination conception, each has its advantages and disadvantages. Our scholars have also studied on this problem, but there is disagreement too.This paper distinguishes terrorist organizations as five types, nationalism type, religious extremism type, political extremism type(include far-right type and far-left type), and dissident type, represented by LTTE, al-Qaeda, The Far-Right Militiaman in America, The Red Brigades, and The Earth Liberation Front. We get four characters after studying them: first, political purpose; second, violent and terror; third, membership and organize structure; fourth, durative. These will be the basis for the definition of terrorist organizations.Then we compare terrorist organizations with two conception groups, one group includes the Mafia-style organization, the heathendom organization, the organized criminal syndicate, and the penal crime group, the other group includes terrorist individual and terrorist gang. From the comparing study on the conception of terrorist organizations on both essential and formal aspects, we define terrorist organizations as: terrorist organizations are criminal organizations with specifically structure, made up with three persons or more, and taking terrorism as their measures and main purpose.