Application Of Risk Criminal Law In China

The concept “Risk Society” provoked great repercussion in the field of society, since it was coined by Ulrich Beck during the 1980 s. The advancement of Industrial Revolution and technology not just brought the wealth to satisfy human’s demand, but also created many extraordinary risk. In the risk society, the new risk has several features including human-oriented risk, scalability of consequence, uncertainty of influencing path and so on, and all of these become the stumbling block to restrict the development of human society. Meanwhile, China is experiencing significant social change, and compared from the development process in the West, China is in the stage of extensive urbanization. Many events show our country is entering or has entered into risk society, such as pollution, food safety(poison capsule, Sudan, shoes yogurt), nuclear spill, etc. Therefore, under the society like our country, it is so important to understand risk society.Since the Enlightenment, the criminal law can simply be recognized by one of the achievements of modern society, while the criminal law is also an effective tool to maintain the social order and avoid the risk of country. With the view of risk society emerging, the traditional criminal law become a little powerless due to its lags, doctrine of liability fixation, and narrow scope of legal interest, so the risk of criminal law theory is made to solve this dilemma. In some scholars’ view who agree with the theory of criminal law, the traditional criminal law cannot effectively solve risk problem in the modern society. In order to complete its mission, achieve the effective control of new risk, protect the legal interest in advance, and reinforce preventive function of criminal law, we need to make adjustments positively based on functionality of the criminal law, protection range of legal interests and doctrine of liability fixation etc. However, we cannot vacillate the modest principle of the criminal law—as the last parclose of social order, the purpose of criminal is not just to punish crimes, but also to protect human rights. If we just abuse the theory of risk criminal law blindly, the basic human rights could not be guaranteed. Therefore, this article will describe the principles which should be followed when we apply the criminal law.In recent year, China also has began to pay attention to the theory of risk criminal law, and the most prominent aspect is the legislation. Some relevant provision about abstract potential damage offense is the best proof, for example, the criminal provisions related to dangerous driving and production & sales are both optimizing presentation of risk criminal law. Nonetheless, improvement of legislation will be a long and tough progress, hence the criminal law is still imperfect in many aspects. In the end of the article, our students propose their own ideas about the applicative areas of the risk criminal law, and they really hope to contribute their pygmy effort to spread the risk criminal law.