individuals are held responsible for their conduct and any associated intent.111 Conduct with intent – actus reus and mens rea, or the material and mental elements – provide the objective and subjective conditions for punishability and form the essential nexus between the individual and the criminal wrong.112 The intervention of criminal law is generally justified where an individual has caused or contributed to harm to a protected value (the “harm principle”).113 As an exception, criminal law also penalizes inchoate crimes, before the harm has arisen or the crime has taken place, on the basis that the conduct in question, committed with criminal intent, poses a significant danger that harm occurs.114 Preparatory acts, which may include planning or conspiracy with a view to committing or contributing to a terrorist offence, may also be prosecuted if the relevant elements are met. The law cannot, however, prosecute an abstract danger that an individual is seen to represent. It cannot prosecute what one might do, but what one has done or intended to do, albeit before impact is felt. It cannot punish thoughts, however dangerous society perceives an individual’s ideas to be, but can only intervene when they are converted into concrete acts.115 While harm may ultimately be caused by another person, there must be sufficient normative involvement of an individual in the wrongful act, or at the very least in the deliberate creation of risk of such a wrongful act taking place, to justify criminal intervention.116 Conversely, remoteness is a constraining principle of criminal law, such that individuals cannot be prosecuted absent a meaningful proximate link between 111  See e.g., European Parliament, EU Approach to Criminal Law, op. cit., note 108. 112  A. Ashworth and L. Zedner, Preventive Justice, op. cit., note 105; and fuller discussion in H. Duffy and K. Pitcher, “Inciting Terrorism? Crimes of Expression and the Limits of the Law”, op. cit., note 85. 113  For a discussion of the “harm principle” see: A. Ashworth and L. Zedner, Preventive Justice, op. cit., note 105. 114  Examples would include direct and public incitement to genocide in international criminal law, where the conduct (the expression) in question creates a significant danger that this serious crime will be committed, and the accused intends this to happen, which can be punished even if the crime does not ultimately occur. 115  In accordance with the Roman law principle cogitationis poenam nemo patitur (“nobody endures punishment for thought.”, Justinian’s Digest (48.19.18)), punishment cannot encroach into the private sphere of the individual, until such time as the thoughts have been brought, through conduct, into the external world. See also: A. Ashworth and L. Zedner, Preventive Justice, op. cit., note 105, p. 110. A provision in French counter-terrorism legislation, which was declared unconstitutional by the French Constitutional Council in 2017, has been described as a “crime of thought”. The provision sought to criminalize consultation of terrorist websites “when accompanied by the desire to adhere to an ideology expressed by these services” but otherwise fell short of requiring terrorist intent. See B. Boutin, “Excesses of Counter-Terrorism and Constitutional Review in France: The Example of the Criminalisation of the Consultation of Websites”, Verfassungsblog, 10 May 2018, <https://verfassungsblog.de/where-visiting-a-website-is-now-a-crime-excesses-of-counter-terrorism-and-constitutionalreview-in-france/>. 116  For crimes, such as terrorist attacks, to be imputed to another who, for example, possesses material or makes statements that may be deemed by some to “glorify” such acts, the original actor must have had “some form of normative involvement [in the other person’s] subsequent choice” to commit a crime and “the intent to cause the final crime itself”. See: A. Ashworth and L. Zedner, Preventive Justice, op. cit., note 105, p. 112, quoting Simester and von Hirsch. Note that the breadth and ambiguity of the offences, and the need for broad contextual analysis of facts, means that wide-reaching and potentially prejudicial evidence that may not normally be relevant and admitted is placed before the jury in common law systems. This risks making thought, if not the basis of the crime charged, at least strongly influential in determination of guilt. Guidelines for Addressing the Threats and Challenges of “Foreign Terrorist Fighters” 37