"Crime is normal, even natural behaviour," Ezzat Fattah contends.

Decriminalization of drugs, modernization of the criminal law, abolition of the death penalty and of prisons, the struggle for human rights and for social justice have been some of the controversial lifelong focal issues for the critical research and social activism of Ezzat Fattah.

Among several crusading international missions he undertook for Amnesty International, the one to Libya stands out because of his pivotal address to the People’s Assembly and the session he had with Colonel Khaddafi pleading for the commutation of sentences of those on death row.

Founder of the SFU School of Criminology and one of the early pioneers in the young discipline of victimology, Dr. Ezzat Fattah’s research led him to become an outspoken critic of the victim movement, whose demands he sees as punitive and vindictive. He advocates instead a humane system of restorative justice, based on the notions of healing, reparation and restitution.