Publications

Trying to discuss the issue of an new theory of criminal law raises a lot of complex problems, making necessary some preliminary observations. First of all, we have to reassure, that we need a better theory of criminal law and not a theory better than criminal law. Abandoning criminal law and facing the offender merely as an mentally ill person, needing help and protection, deprives him from the human right guarantees and opens the way to a totalitarian and oppressive criminal system. Second, it would be very risky to abandon the theory of Plato, according to which a rational punishment is inflicted not because the offender has committed an offence but in order not to commit another in the future.

Consider the following example:
Two friends, A and B, decide in common to steal a motorcycle. According to their plan, one of them (A) will cut off the anti-theft chain and the other (B) will start the engine. As A is trying to cut the chain and B is waiting to do his own part, both get arrested by the police. Can the second participant be charged with attempted theft as co-principal, even though he objectively did nothing constituting a “beginning of perpetration”?

This text was first published in the Greek legal journal ʺΥπεράσπισηʺ (ʺDefenceʺ) 1993, p. 243. For a more detailed presentation of the topic see Mylonopoulos, Komparative und Dispositionsbegriffe im Strafrecht, Munich 1998, Lang Verlag (in German).

Consider the following example: Two friends, A and B, decide in common to steal a motorcycle. According to their plan, one of them (A) will cut off the anti-theft chain and the other (B) will start the engine. As A is trying to cut the chain and B is waiting to do his own part, both get arrested by the police. Can the second participant be charged with attempted theft as co-principal, even though he objectively did nothing constituting a “beginning of perpetration”?

It is beyond any doubt that criminal law is one of the faster developing branches of law. This is due to the spectacular expansion of international criminal law, which already, in the 1920s, Professor Vespacien Pella called “the criminal law of the future”.

Trying to discuss the issue of an new theory of criminal law raises a lot of complex problems, making necessary some preliminary observations. First of all, we have to reassure, that we need a better theory of criminal law and not a theory better than criminal law.

According to art. 7 of the Greek Constitution and art. 1 of the Greek Criminal Code no criminal sanction may be imposed without a previous law providing for the elements of the action. The criminal sentence presupposes therefore an action, i.e. the conscious activity of a human being.

Revue hellenique de Droit International. 1990, p. 122-National Report at the XIIIth International Congress of Comparative Law, Montreal 1990