New Essence and Categorization of Criminal Offenses and Responsibility

Abstract

The authors analyze the positions of Ukrainian, Russian and other scholars of the post-Soviet and the EU countries regarding the essence and categorization of offenses and ensuing legal responsibility, as well as the place that criminal offenses hold among them and responsibility for these offences. They draw attention to the discrepancies in the positions of those authors who believe crimes and misdemeanors to be socially dangerous and the requirements in the Criminal Codes of many countries that state directly that due to its insignificance an action stops being socially dangerous and criminal. In this connection it is not logical that Ukraine and a number of other countries have introduced such categories as criminal offenses and criminal misdemeanors. The authors suggest solving this problem by introducing a fifth category of crimes based on the degree of gravity — the mildest crimes. Using new approaches of different researchers, the authors present their own solution of the problem: they define and categorize offenses into criminal ones (crimes – actions that have all the indicia and elements of a crime; underage acts — committed by persons who have not reached the age of criminal responsibility; insane acts — offenses committed by mentally incompetent and partially mentally incompetent persons; guiltless acts — when there is not guilty party; accidents — acts of natural forces, including acts of animals without the activity of a person) and non-criminal (constitutional, administrative, disciplinary, civil, business) offences that are further categorized in the same way into misdemeanors, underage acts, insane acts and special cases, whose essence is determined similarly to the corresponding types of criminal offenses. New approaches of different scholars allowed the authors to present their own variant of determining the essence and structure of legal responsibility and its categorization into administrative, disciplinary, civil and business responsibility with further subdivision, using the example of constitutional and criminal responsibility, of all types of legal responsibility into positive and negative (punitive-educational, restorative and concomitant).