The Review Of The Chinese Regulations Of The Limitation Period For Criminal Prosecution

Illustrating the democracy and humanism of the criminal legislation in China, the regulations of the limitation period for criminal prosecution are of great importance. As an alternative system that abjures the punishment, the core of the limitation period for criminal prosecution is to legally limit the power of both the state and citizens to prosecute the crimes while to excuse the criminals who have not been prosecuted and punished for a certain period of time.However, in the Code of the Criminal Law of the People's Republic of China are only three articles concerning the limitation period for criminal prosecution, and each of them is too simple to differentiate essentially different facts and to preclude different explanation. Furthermore, this problem has not been taken seriously and the academic writing is rarely seen. Neither the legislation nor judiciary, while interpreting the Code of the Criminal Law of the People's Republic China, have made any modification and limitation to the limitation period for criminal prosecution. As a result, the regulations of the limitation period, which tends to prosecute the criminals as many as possible, do not fit in with the judicial object of crime prevention, and go against the uniformity and stabilization of the legal order.This article deals with the four matters at length here. First is the significance of the regulations of the limitation period of the prosecution; the second focuses on the review of the values of these regulations; in the third line, a few specific provisions, that has been highlighted in recent years, are considered; in the fourth is thesuggestions to improve the regulations of the limitation period for criminal prosecution in the future.Reviewing the regulations of the limitation period of prosecution in the context of the principles of the current criminal legislation, it can be said that the former, having a very narrow range of application and therefore to a large extent losing, its expected functions, does not match the latter. The three articles of the limitation period of prosecution not only are ambitious and self-contradicted, but also leave out the crimes committing by a unit. The writer of this paper, after reading relevant legal literature, sums up the above main shortages of the current regulations of the limitation period of prosecution, and concludes that the amendment of the regulations depends on the change of the legal ideology. Moreover, the paper suggests a new formula to calculate the limitation period of the prosecution in the case of negligent crimes where the consequences are subject to delay. Finally, the paper points out that reasonable standards of discontinuing and extending the limitation of prosecution is necessary to strike the balance between safeguarding security of the State and protecting lawful rights of the defendants.