The Function Of Peotection Of Human Right And Contrling Of Social Order Criminal Law

As an important part in legal regimes of a country, criminal law not only maintains the social order and punishes the criminal offences, safeguards the good order of production and life environment of massive people, but also protects any innocent from undue punishment and prevents any one from abusing the penalty power. In the whole legal system, criminal law plays an important role to maintenance of the social order and protection of human rights, due to its extensiveness, significance in concerning interests and the strictness of its sanction means on criminal offence. The basic functions of criminal law can be concluded as control of social order and protection of human rights. The control of social order is the means applied by criminal law, and the protection of human rights is the objective of criminal law, which two are opposite yet concordant. The control of social order is the basis for successive development of human society. Without it, human society is bound to be chaotic and no one can be ensured of freedom and rights. The protection of human rights is the value pursued by human society. Without the human rights and freedom, human being will lose its dynamics of development, and the social order can not be kept therefore. For the view of history, ancient criminal law has a strong function of control and a week function of human rights protection. To put it detailed, the regulating scope of ancient criminal law is too extensive, which interferes with personal life, takes any act endangers the ruling order as the most serious crime, extensively applies death penalty and penalties cruelly maiming human bodies and humiliation penalty seriously infringing the personal rights, grants too much discretion to judicial officials and causes lots of arbitrary in judicial practice. On the contrary, neoteric criminal law has a strong function of human rights protection and a week function of control. For instance, it strictly adheres to the principle of statutory crime and penalty, grants an absolute right to silence to the accused. While modern criminal law makes a compromise on the control of social order and protection of human rights, which expands the scope of social order control, restricts the right to silence by means of criminal legislation, and improves and prefects the protection of human rights. All aspects of the control of social order and protection of human rights are interdependent on each other, which are dynamic and limited, being constantly adjusted and kept at a dynamic balance according to the change of politics, economy and culture. Therefore, when handling these two functions of criminal law, i.e. control of social order and protection of human rights, the conception of functions of criminal law shall be improved and perfected gradually, the angle of view to the functions of criminal law shall be widened, and the application of criminal law shall pay attention to both functions.