Investigation of crimes of official misconduct and neglect of duty of forest engineers working in state forest enterprises

Abstract

Crimes such as neglect of duty and misconduct are actions committed by public officer or civil servant ending up with public nuisance and also are actions defined as criminal acts in the law. According to laws of the Republic of Turkey, forest engineers working in the state forest administrations are qualified as public officer and also have all rights, duties, responsibilities and authority granted to public officers. In this study it was aimed to examine the case studies as the defendant of crimes of official misconduct and neglect of duty of the forest engineers who served as public officers. For this purpose, cases in which the forest engineers subject to neglect of duty and misconduct while they are in charge of state forest administrations have been selected among the hundreds of high court decisions. 110 examples of the Supreme Court decisions obtained from the Electronic Law Database were grouped according to their subjects and then analyzed in detail. As a result of the assessment; the majority of cases related to neglect of duty of the forest engineers aroused from not to take a minutes down for forest crimes. However, crimes related to misconduct aroused from their willingness to undeserved individual gains from defendants or other persons by use of their positions and authorities. To reduce or even eliminate such incident cases, it is necessary that officers must know the rights, authorities, duties and responsibilities given to them, and that they do not meddle in actions that constitute the resultant crime.