Judicial Law Views Quarterly (Law Views)

Until the late 20th century, assigning the criminal liability to the legal persons Until the late 20th century, assigning the criminal liability to the legal persons was ambiguous and rejected obviously in most legal systems for a variety of reasons such as:  legal persons are artificial and lack criminal mansuetude, lack of proportion between the crimes and punishments, lack of realization of the penalty goals specifically regeneration, breaching the penalty of being personal and breaching the principle of expertise. However, social requirements and the ever-increasing role of the legal entities in social developments as well as possessing dangerous sources and widely involvement in criminal activities including economic, industrial, environmental, health, transportation, crimes against people and security, and inefficiency of non-criminal sanctions in preventing the crimes made it necessary to assign them criminal liability. What made gradually the reasons of the opponents of the legal persons’ criminal liability ineffective were: assuming them as an independent identity and believing in being dominated by a collective will and prediction of sanctions along with the nature of these identities such as dissolution as a penalty equal to hanging a real person or judicial watch in order to meet retrieving purposes. Based on this reality, the French criminal system in 1992 and about two decades later in Iran (2013) accepted the criminal liability of the legal identities as a rule rather than as an exception. In this paper, we are going to answer the following questions: does the liability in the two systems cover various kinds of public and private persons or is it restricted to just private identities? Is the persons’ liability direct or indirect? What are conditions for realization of the liability? Are the assignable crimes to the legal persons restricted or widespread? What are the assignable crimes? Are they various and appropriate?