TRASATURILE ESENTIALE ALE INFRACTIUNII. ASPECTE CRITICE - ESSENTIAL FEATURES OF CRIME. CRITICAL ASPECTS (Romanian version)

The offense is defined in art.17 of the Penal Code as the socially harmful act committed by guilt and stipulated by the criminal law. The different and controversial ways in which the crime may be characterized has determined the authors to affirm that the legislator should refrain from giving a general definition of the crime as this task has to be assumed by the criminal doctrine. In spite of this fact, the New Criminal Code defines the crime in art.15 as “the act stipulated by the criminal law, committed by guilt, unjustified and imputable to the person that committed it”. The first essential characteristic is that the act should be stipulated by the criminal law, while the guilt appears as the second essential characteristic of the crime. Besides these two essential features, the new Penal Code introduces two new characteristics: the unjustified character of the crime and the imputable character of the crime. The criminal doctrine criticizes the unclear way in which the text of art.15 is formulated in the New Penal Code, laying stress on the fact that a law must not include terms with multiple meanings in order to avoid conflicting solutions. The definition of the concept of crime by means of its components (actual facts stipulated by criminal law, committed by guilt), can be found in all the definitions of the concept included in the reference European criminal legislations. In some cases, this definition has been completed by other essential features, and other times this definition has been compressed. In our opinion, a definition suggested by the specialized literature that is worthy of note is the one according to which the crime is an act stipulated by the criminal law in regard to which none of the justificatory causes stipulated by law interfered and committed by guilt.