Suchergebnisse

In the previous legislative period, that is from 2013 to 2017, the Grand Coalition in the Federal Republic of Germany, consisting of Christian Democratic Party (CDU, CSU) and Social Democratic Party (SPD), under leadership of Angela Merkel, has carried out numerous reforms in the area of criminal law. Not only have the penal provisions of the Special Part of the German Criminal Code (Strafgesetzbuch - StGB) been supplemented and expanded, but the basic provisions of its General Part, which are relevant and applicable to all criminal offences, have also been modified. This article presents the most important reforms. Not only are the respective motives of the legislator presented, but also the reactions of criminal science and practice. The aim is to critically assess the reforms and their impact. In addition, the article gives a brief outlook on the forthcoming German legislation in the current legislative period. The article concludes that criminal law reforms in the last legislative period mainly consisted of tightening and broadening criminal law provisions reflecting actionism and populism. The German Federal Constitutional Court is expected to review the constitutionality of several provisions. The German legislator failed to recognise that tightened rules would be ineffective in practice if prosecution did not become more effective and the likelihood of detecting crimes was not increased. In future, the re-elected Grand Coalition should take greater account of the findings of criminal science. One proposal in this context would be that the planned reform of the sanctions law for companies would also strengthen the rights of defence of companies.

Using a broad understanding of criminal law risks, their classification, and issues examined within the recently proposed theory of criminal riskology, the authors conclude that it is necessary to apply this theory to the research of public relations in the field of counteracting corruption, and specifically, to assess criminal law risks of corruption in the private sector, or commercial corruption. In this connection, alongside the group of corruption-related crimes, corruption crimes that are included in the Russian doctrine of criminal law and criminology, they propose specifying an independent group of crimes in the field of anticorruption compliance, which are based on criminal breach of contracts of service in commercial or other organizations and, primarily, crimes connected with commercial bribery. The authors also use their assessment of Russian and German criminal legislation and the practice of its enforcement to conduct a general analysis of crimes that could be classified as crimes in the field of anticorruption compliance. According to the authors, such crimes include corruption-related crimes proper if they are characterized by specific crime-indication features as well as so-called accompanying crimes (mainly, economic ones). Although a compilation of a full list of corresponding crimes is not included in the scope of this article, the authors believe that it will directly depend on the maximally precise understanding of the picture of criminal law risks of corruption in the private sector. They come to the conclusion that the system of crimes in the field of anticorruption compliance differs in its quantitative and qualitative characteristics from the systems of corruption-related crimes and corruption crimes. Separating crimes in the field of anticorruption compliance as a separate group alongside corruption-related crimes (corruption crimes) will make it possible to examine the mechanisms of committing such crimes more thoroughly, to work out special measures of their prevention, to conduct a ...