Explain its characteristics and the special legal treatment.

Political crime — the offence against the state-or-the-political-order: the acts aimed at the government, the constitution, the state's security — and (the critical school's extension) the state's own crimes against persons-and-peoples. The characteristics: the political motive (the power's aim — not the private gain); the public's stage (the message's theatre); the legal systems' special treatment (the political offence's exception in the extradition law — the classic doctrine); the contestability (the freedom-fighter-or-terrorist's lens — the legitimacy's debate); the state's double face (the offender-and-victim simultaneously — the oppressive-state paradox).