The Crime of Public Officials' Neglect of Duties Causing Catastrophe: An Analysis Focusing on Legal Interests
Date Issued
2012
Date
2012
Author(s)
Li, Guan-Jhang
Abstract
The Article 130, “A public official who neglects his duties thereby causing a catastrophe shall be sentenced to imprisonment for not less than three years but not more than ten years.,” of ROC(Taiwan) Criminal Code, is the main and essential clause used to chase public officials’ legal responsibility after a catastrophe occurs. Nevertheless, since the structure of the Article 130 is quite simplified, and the amount of correlated references and judgments is not very sufficient, there remains many problems in the ways of explanation and application of the Article 130.
In the first part of this thesis, the discussion begins with the history of the Article 130, in the collection of related references and several representative judgments, trying to depict the outline of how the Article 130 is being explained and applied at present, which is the foundation of following discussion.
In the second part, based on the thought that the protection of legal interests is the most important purpose of modern criminal law, this thesis tries to figure out the legal interests of the Article 130 from the views of system, history, comparative law, and the consideration of the balance between crime and punishment. In this thesis’ opinion, there are two main legal interests of the Article 130; the first one is the trust from the general public toward the public officials that the public officials would execute their own business impartially and appropriately, and the second one is public safety related to the protection of plural personal legal interests of unspecified persons or multiple specified persons.
After determining what the legal interests are, the thesis goes back to examine the components of the Article 130, trying to point out proper standards, which correspond with the above-mentioned suggestion of the legal interests of the Article 130, to interpret these components. In this thesis’ opinion, the “catastrophes” of the Article 130 shall be the ones endangering public safety. As for the “duties” or business of the public official, since it is difficult to identify previously whether one specific public official is responsible for preventing the occurrence of a certain catastrophe, the determination shall be based on the ascertainment of the causal relationship in each individual case.
Subjects
public official
duty negligence
catastrophe
legal interest
trust
endangering public safety
causal relationship
SDGs
Type
thesis
File(s)![Thumbnail Image]()
Loading...
Name
index.html
Size
23.27 KB
Format
HTML
Checksum
(MD5):10ec3bf0314995311575ffe4dd90f646