Raúl Zaffaroni

Zaffaroni has drafted penal legislation for Argentina (1991), Costa Rica (1991), and Ecuador (1992). He has written 25 books, including Manual de Derecho Penal, Tratado de Derecho Penal in five volumes, En busca de las penas perdidas and Estructuras judiciales. He co-authored Derecho Penal: General with Alejandro Slokar and Alejandro Alagia. He has published extensively in scholarly journals.

Zaffaroni has been called a garantista, meaning a holder of a certain type of criminal law abolitionist position. He was criticized because of his former open abolitionism (easily recognizable in his 1989 book En busca de las penas perdidas), from which he later distanced himself and now he identifies with what he calls "reductive functionalism," that is an extreme form of criminal minimalism tending to abolitionism. He endorses what he names "agnostic theory of punishment," implying no theory is sufficient to justify the existence of prisons. He is close to critical criminology and has criticized the War on Drugs.

Zaffaroni served two decades on the Federal Penal Court of Buenos Aires City, from 1975 to 1990. Then he was the General Director of the Instituto Latinoamericano de Prevención del Delito, a branch of the United Nations. He represented the Front for a Country in Solidarity in the assembly that drew up the 1994 reform of the Argentine Constitution. He was a member of the Buenos Aires Chamber of Representatives in 1997, and Director of the National Institute Against Discrimination during 2000-2001.

Zaffaroni holds a Ph.D. in Law and Social Sciences from Universidad Nacional del Litoral, awarded in 1964. He is Professor and Chair of the Department of Criminal Law at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. He serves as President of the Advisory Committee of the Instituto de Políticas Públicas (Public Policy Institute) and Vice President of the Scientific Committee of the International Association of Penal Law. He has been awarded OEA and Max Planck Stiftung fellowships and won the Stockholm Prize in Criminology in 2009. He holds honorary degrees from universities in Latin America, Spain, and Italy.

Eugenio Raúl Zaffaroni (born 1940, in Buenos Aires) is an Argentine judge of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, elected in 2016. He served as a member of the Supreme Court of Argentina from 2003 until 2015, when he resigned due to age restrictions to hold the position.