Political crime

In the standard sense of the phrase, a political crime is an action deemed illegal by a government in order to control real or imagined threats to its survival, at the expense of a range of human rights and freedoms. Thus actions which are not criminal per se, meaning that they are not anti-social but pro-social, are criminalized at the convenience of the group holding power.

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The meaning of the phrase has sometimes been extended to encompass crimes often qualified of terrorism. See below.

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