Moral Damage Compensation Applicable To Criminal Suit Incidental Civil Action

Chinese civil laws and the State Compensation Law prescribe the provisions on the relief of victim's moral interests;the new Criminal Procedure Code,as "mini-constitution," explicitly includes the respect and protection of human rights in Article Two,but excludes the relief of victim's moral damage compensation,so that in criminal cases,the legitimate rights and interests of the injured party is difficult to get a comprehensive and equitable relief.Damage should be compensated and rights should guarantee relief.As an important system to protect personal rights of citizens,mental damage compensation system should have its place in the criminal incidental civil action.However,the reality is that,when subjected to a crime against moral damage claim,victims often encounter obstacles.The circumstances compel people to think that moral damage is not less harmful than physical pain,and that the body can be cured after treatment,but the moral damage caused by traumas is hard to reconcile even by taking a life time.Physical injury can be remedied by judicial explanation,but moral comfort cannot be achieved via judicial procedure.With the deepening of judicial practice and the concept of human rights,damages of mental problems caused by criminal incidental civil action have received widespread attention.Many scholars wrote books and called for the inclusion of compensation for moral damage in incidental civil action into law and proposed some feasible methods.There are various ways to involve the compensation of moral damages into incidental civil action.Some scholars proposed to build a system of moral damage compensation on incidental civil action;some suggested importing the compensation into incidental civil action;others put forward to amend the Criminal Procedure Law.In contrast,the author holds the view that the incidental civil action shall apply to compensation for moral damage,which means that the mechanism has actually established,but not applied according to lack of judicial operational reasons.No matter what approaches are chosen,but the purpose is the same.Based on a case as starting point,this article discusses the sensible and legitimate application of compensation for moral damage from the perspective of the judicial practice of a prefecture-level city court.