Study On The Forfeiture Of Property

Forfeiture of Property is one of the Criminal penalty in Which one portion or the whole of the criminal's private property is nationalized.As one kind of an old and harsh punishment,it takes an important role in human history and also had it's rational reasons to exist.But enter into the modern society,under the impact of the Enlightenment Thought and with the development of capitalist commercial economy, a lot of Western countries abolished Forfeiture of Property in their criminal code. Today,from the information I collected,only a handful of countries such as Bulgaria has retained the Forfeiture of Property in criminal code.It is also worth noting that the Russian Federation(the criminal law system is very similar to our criminal law system) have also approved an amendment(2008) to repeal the Forfeiture of Property. This has to arose our thinking.So to speak,it becomes word tendency to abolish this penalty because of the evolution of punishment,but our criminal law betrays this trend and have many provisions about Forfeiture of Property.Based on the researched conducted in academic circus,most foreign countries have abolished this penalty,and there is no theoretical debate on it.However in our country,some in favor of retaining the Forfeiture of Property,some support that this penalty must be limited,others contend that this penalty should be abolished.Under the impact of the heavy punishment and legal traditions,coupled with disregard for private rights,the majority of scholars uphold retaining Forfeiture of Property.This article is divided into three chapters,the first chapter is the basic theory of the Forfeiture of Property,the second chapter is the historical development of the Forfeiture of Property,the third chapter is focus on analyzing the reasons of abolishing this penalty.The main purpose of this article is that analyzing the unreasonable of this penalty,and finally come to the conclusion:Forfeiture of Property should be abolished in our criminal law.