| Separated from the previous crime of smuggling, the crime of smuggling common goods and articles is newly prescribed by the Criminal Law of the People's Republic of China revised at the Fifth Session of the Eighth National People's Congress on March 14, 1997. It is also the most familiar crime of the 12 crimes of smuggling. The crime of smuggling common goods and articles is one of the serious crimes in our current economic life. After the national anti-smuggling conference held in 1998, the State Council of the PRC decided to establish an anti-smuggling department under the General Administration of Customs, then all customs strengthened more efforts to crack down the crimes of smuggling, and disposed many big cases. Because the legislation of the crime of smuggling common goods and articles is not yet to the utmost perfect, all levels of judicial organs meet a lot of problems in the process of handling such cases. The Supreme People's Court, the Supreme People's Procuratorate, the General Administration of Customs made some researches on the problems and accordingly released judicial interpretations. In September 2000, the Supreme People's Court promulgated (Fashi2000] No.30) the judicial explanation about the problems in handling criminal cases of smuggling. In July 2002, the Supreme People's Court, the Supreme People's Procuratorate, the General Administration of Customs jointly released 24 opinions on the procedure, evidence and application of laws in handling criminal cases of smuggling. Above-mentioned interpretations and opinions solved some problems met in the process of investigation, procuratorial work and adjudication of the criminal cases of smuggling and performed a good function in handling criminal cases of smuggling. But in the conflict of smuggling and anti-smuggling, the smuggling methods are always changing. Especially after China entering into the WTO, there appeared many new smuggling circumstances, new characteristics and new methods, such as: the acts of directly buying bonded goods and duty-reduced or duty-exempted goods imported under special permission, price-deceiving, cheating the customs in canceling procedures, selling registers and certificates issued by the customs at profit and fees-and-duties-in-all smuggling, etc. Meantime, in judicial practice, there are still some problems on the conviction and sentence of the crime of smuggling of goods and articles, such as: whether the foreign companies to be the subject of the crime of smuggling goods and articles, how to determine the persons who are directly in charge and the other persons who are directly responsible for the crime, whether to be necessary to distinguish principal criminals and accomplices in the crime of smuggling goods and articles committed by a unit, how to determine the boundary of the criminal attempt and the completed offense, and the handling of the smuggling goods and articles. Through several years'judicial practice, we can see that there are some detects worthy of discussions in the interpretations about the crimes of smuggling promulgated by the Supreme People's Court, the Supreme People's Procuratorate, the General Administration of Customs, such as: how to determine the criminal object of the crime of common goods and articles, how to determine the act of buying smuggling goods and articles directly from the smugglers as an intentional crime, how to convict the act of smuggling with an uncertain object and how to understand the word"at profits", etc. This article tries to base on the concept of the crime of smuggling goods and articles, analyze the new circumstances, new characteristics and new methods of smuggling, study on the disputed problems, and put forward some opinions on the interpretations on the crime of smuggling. |
