Journal articles on the topic 'Criminal Code, Austria, drafts'

Reborn in 1918, the Polish state inherited from the partition countries: Russia, Prussia and Austria their legal systems. The task of unifying the codification of the law was entrusted to the Codification Commission, established on the basis of the Act of 1919. The Commission was to prepare draft legislation in the field of civil and criminal law. It was a body of 44 lawyers and had a high degree of independence from political factors. As a result of the Commission’s work, more than 20 legal acts were created. In the area of civil law, these were laws mainly related to foreign legal transactions. These included, among others, bills of exchange and cheque law, copyright law, patent law, law on combating unfair competition. The two laws of 1926 were of particular importance: private international law and inter-district law. Three codes of private law were also created: the Code of Obligations (1933, considered the most outstanding civil work of the Commission), the Commercial Code and the Code of Civil Procedure. In the area of criminal law, a full codification was carried out, first by implementing the Code of Criminal Procedure (1928) and then the Criminal Code (1932). These two acts were based on different doctrinal bases, which made criminal law inconsistent. The Criminal Code of Juliusz Makarewicz in particular was an outstanding work, based on the findings of the School of Sociological Criminal Law. The Codification Commission did not finish its work until the outbreak of the war. However, present codes are largely based on the solutions developed within the Commission.

The subject of the article is the presentation of the genesis of criminalisation of capital fraud in the Polish Criminal Code. Further edits of the projects of this crime in the drafts of the current Criminal Code are also analysed, as well as the scope of criminalisation and the problem of repression of capital fraud in Polish criminal law. In addition, solutions proposed to criminalise capital fraud in neighbouring countries are presented. These analyses provide the basis for reporting significant legislative changes.

The article is devoted to the analysis of problematic issues of draft laws registered in the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine: “On Amendments to Articles 286 and 2861 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine on Strengthening Liability for Violation of Road Safety Rules”; “On Amendments to Articles 286 and 2861 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine on Strengthening Liability for Violation of Road Safety Rules” № 6240-1 of November 8, 2021; “On Amendments to the Criminal Code of Ukraine to Strengthen Liability for Criminal Offenses against Traffic Safety and Operation of Transport”№ 6240-2 of November 17, 2021. These projects are said to increase criminal liability for violating traffic safety rules or operating vehicles by persons driving vehicles, including under the influence of alcohol, drugs or other intoxicants or under the influence of drugs that reduce attention and speed of reaction. There is disagreement with the authors of the bill to establish a more severe punishment for deprivation of human life in the village than the punishment for deprivation of human life outside the village. The inconsistency of the penalties proposed in the drafts with the current sanctions of the articles of the general norms of the Special Part (Articles 119, 128 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine) aimed at criminal protection of human health and life and sanctions of special norms (Articles 286, 2861 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine) punishment in the form of imprisonment. Emphasis is placed on the inconsistency of the draft proposals with the provisions of Art. 55 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine on the limits of punishment for deprivation of the right to drive vehicles. It is proposed to provide for legal provisions regarding the restoration of a person's right to drive a vehicle in the event of lifelong deprivation of the right to drive vehicles or deprivation of the right to drive vehicles for a period of twenty years.

This article examines the features of the Russian criminal law norm that provides for liability for the murder of a newborn child by a mother. We analyzed the data of the Judicial Department on the statistics of convicts for 2016 and 2019 under Article 106 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation in relation to the indicators of other privileged elements of murder, indicating the latency of this type of crime. The article also examines some features of the legislative structure of Article 106 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, accompanied by examples of judicial practice. The article examines the criminal law norms providing for responsibility for infanticide, the legislation of Italy, Austria, Switzerland, Holland and Denmark, and highlights the distinctive features of Article 106 of the Russian criminal legislation. The article presents proposals for possible improvement of the norms of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation on responsibility for the murder of a newborn child by a mother, confirmed by the indicators of a sociological study.

Draft laws of Ukraine towards the amendments to the Penal Code of Ukraine aimed to overcome the pandemic disease COVID-19, caused by Coronavirus SARS-COV-2 are analyzed, namely: "On Amendments to the Penal Code (concerning the criminal liability for violation of the established procedure for vaccination of citizens against infectious diseases)" registration № 4647 26/01/2021 and "On Amendments to the Penal Code of Ukraine in terms of liability for forgery of documents about preventive vaccination" registration № 6084 23/09/21. Some disadvantages of the following drafts are identified: 1) importation into Ukraine of a vaccine not registered in the State Register of medicine products is currently considered as an illegal activity; 2) placing into turnover of an unregistered medical product is a falsification and entails criminal liability under the provisions of the current article 321-1 of the Penal Code of Ukraine. Therefore, it makes no sense to criminalize actions of this nature; 3) the level of public danger of the proposed criminal offense (Article 321-3 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine) is not sufficient for the existence of the sanction Part 1 – imprisonment and its classification as "minor crimes"; 5) establishment of separate (special) criminal liability for forgery of documents related to preventive vaccinations is an excessive criminalization; 6) introduction of the proposed criminal offense (Article 321-3 of the Penal Code of Ukraine) to Section XIII "Criminal offenses in the sphere of drugs, psychotropic substances, their analogues or precursors and other criminal offenses against public health" Special part of the PenalCode of Ukraine does not take into account principles of the existing criminal law doctrine on delimitation and definition of the object of criminal law protection. The inexpediency of detailing the forms of the objective side of the proposed criminal offense (Article 321-3 of the Penal Code of Ukraine) by introducing the concepts of "dissemination" and "implementation", as well as the introduction of a broader understanding of the term "use" as a «violation of a prohibition to use (sales and implementation ") is established; The ways to overcome the identified disadvantages and improve the norms of the analyzed bills are pointed out. It is concluded that it is impossible to adopt amendments in this form to the Penal Code of Ukraine.

Galicia used to be a part of the Austrian Empire from 1772. In 1867, it became a part of the dual monarchy of Austria and Hungary.Following the breakdown of the last and quite short period of restoration of Ukrainian statehood in Galicia in 1918–1919, as theresult of post-war peace accords, the territory joined the Second Polish Republic, where it remained until 1939. During the periodbetween 1852 and 1932, the Austrian Criminal Code was in force in Galicia. Besides, starting from the second half of the 19th century,there was a growing public interest in infanticide, which could be explained by the fact that the society considered such acts to beimmoral, where the victim was a defenceless child, whose own mother was a criminal. Such cases were covered in numerous Galicianperiodicals, and the cases themselves became notable. Nonetheless, most of these crimes remained unsolved.The article dwells on the development of the concept of criminal responsibility for infanticide in the Ukrainian territories in themiddle of the 19th – first third of the 20th century in accordance with the provisions of the Austrian Criminal Code 1852.The law clearly established a distinction between abortion and infanticide, however, in both cases, the object of legal protectionwas the child’s life (whether the child was born or not). It was specifically emphasized that the qualifying feature for this crime was amother’s marital status. The have been analysed the motives the legislative establishment could be guided by when formulating theprivileged components of this crime. There have been provided common features of the examination procedure, whose goal was toestablish the fact of the birth of a child alive as a prerequisite for prosecution for infanticide. It was emphasized that criminal and pu -nishable actions mean not only trying to take the child’s life, but also mother’s inactivity in case of failure to provide the necessaryassistance during childbirth process. The paper briefly outlines social, economic and psychological factors that could prompt a womanto commit a crime.

The third partition of Poland, and thus the collapse of the Polish state, spontaneously forced a situation in which the legal orders of the partitioning states came into force almost immediately on Polish lands. In the lands divided between Prussia, Russia and Austria, legal acts of the partitioning states came into force with a strong influence of models derived from French legislation. The Polish lands which came under Austrian rule found themselves in the reality, in which the Austrian legislator conducted codification works on the new penal code, which resulted in the fact that in 1787 the penal code of Joseph II, called Josephine, became binding. As early as 1803, a penal code was introduced in Poland, which was under Austrian rule, under the name of the Book of Laws on Crimes and Serious Police Crimes called Franciscan. In the German annexation there was the Prussian Landrecht, which was characterized by a current far removed from the European science of law. On the territory of the former Duchy of Warsaw a Penal Code for the Kingdom of Poland was introduced. In Russia in 1903, the Tagantsev’s Code came into force, which in its systematics divided crimes according to their gravity into crimes and misdemeanours and clearly separated minor offences. The characteristics of criminal legislation until 1918 made it possible to show the enormity of the work of the Codification Commission, the aim of which, after Poland regained independence, was to create a uniform and coherent Polish legal system, not only in terms of social life standards, but also in the area of the catalogue of its areas.

Codification represents the regulation of a certain field (branch) of law by a comprehensive law called the Code (the Civil Code, Criminal Code, etc.). The success of codification depends on two very important conditions: the first one refers to the existence of a dedicated authority, and the second one concerns its implementation in a great country. For the purpose of research, there will be selected the national legislations in order to demonstrate, through various legal systems, how civil codes regulating the field of civil law were originated. Within the scope of this paper, in more detail, we are going to analyze the selected national legislations of France, Austria, Germany, Switzerland and Italy.

The domestic legislator improves the criminal law norms based on, among other things, foreign experience. In this regard, the author considers the approaches of foreign countries to the definition of the subject of property crimes in general and its «digital variants» in particular. The approaches of some foreign countries (Great Britain, USA, Germany, Austria, Spain, France, Poland) to the establishment of criminal liability for the theft of non-cash funds and digital currency are analyzed. Based on the analysis, the author concludes that in the legislation of foreign states of the Anglo-Saxon and Romano-Germanic systems, the subject of property crimes is defined through the category of «property». In England and the USA, property in general (including non-cash funds and cryptocurrency) can be the subject of any property crimes. In the countries of the continental system (in particular, in the Federal Republic of Germany, Austria, France), within this group of crimes, a subgroup of criminal acts that encroach only on things (for example, theft) is distinguished. It seems that in the domestic criminal law it is also necessary to single out a group of property crimes, which will include crimes against property. Accordingly, in order to solve the problem of the inconsistency of the title of Chapter 21 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation with its content, since the norms of this chapter protect not only objects of property rights (in particular, property rights), but also property rights (claim rights, etc.) that make up the content of obligations relations . It is proposed to clarify the title of Chapter 21 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, heading it «Property Crimes» (taking into account the studied foreign experience). Thus, non-cash funds, which are not things and which are subject to the civil law regime of property rights, are more logical to recognize as the subject of 2property crimes», and not crimes against property.

The subject. This paper deals with problems related to tax law with a special focus on legalregulation of the tax procedure contained in the Czech Tax Procedure Code. Attention ispaid in particular to tax penalty payments and the “non bis in idem” principle.The purpose to identify ratio between penalty payments in tax procedure and in criminalprocedure in context of “non bis in idem” principle.The methodological basis of the article is analysis of legislation and court practice of Czechrepublic, Austria, European Union, including formal legal analysis, comparative analysis,synthesis, systematic approach.The results and scope of application. The existing case law of the Czech criminal courts andof the Supreme Court was based on the legal opinion that a penalty payment imposed bythe tax administration in a tax procedure constitutes no punishment, i.e. it is no sanction ofcriminal nature, so that even the final (enforceable) decision of the tax administration doesnot create a “ne bis in idem”1 barrier in relation to criminal sanctions for the same taxesrelatednon-compliant action (tax evasion) in respect of the penalty payment imposed bythe tax administration.Conclusions. It would probably be advisable for the legislation to amend the relevant provisionsof the Tax Procedure Code in a way that the tax authorities concentrate within thelimits of their powers on proper tax collection and that the law enforcement authorities areauthorized to punishments for deliberate tax evasion. A suggested amendment may thereforebe the removal of the penalty payments from the Tax Procedure Code as the defaultinterest itself is sufficient instrument enough to penalize the taxpayers. Another option is to keep the tax penalty payment in the Tax Procedure Code, but its imposition would only be considered after making sure that the result of any criminal proceedings does not constitute a “ne bis in idem” prohibition within the meaning of Art. 40 (5) of the Charter and Art. 4 (1) of the Protocol No. 7 to the Convention, Section 11 (1) f), g), h), (2) and Section 11a of the Code of Criminal Procedure.

Achieving constitutional unity (expressed by the adoption of the Constitution on March 29, 1923) and legislative unity (in three steps, especially by extending the regulations of the “Old Kingdom: 1928, Bessarabia, 1938 – Bukovina, 1943 – Transylvania) stand as major national acts related to the process of completion the political union of 1918 and consolidating the Romanian national unitary state. They have caused ample debates, facing, in specific terms, beyond conjunctural interests and priorities, there major legal visions and conceptions regarding justice in the Europe of the times, present in the reunified Romania: the neo-Latin, majorly formalist; the Austrian, of “material justice”; and, respectively, the Russian, of a strongly social nature. If regarding the necessity and even the urgency of legislative unification there has been a unanimous standing, the disputes concerned the method of realization, and regional resistances have delayed its effective and full realization. The experiences generated by these contexts – from the four draft projects of a constitutional pact, to laws for partial unification, and successful – the Criminal Code and the Criminal Proceedings Code of 1937 – or failed – the Civil Code, the Civil Proceedings Code and the Commercial Code, adopted in 1939-1940 but their entry into force delayed sine die, the sole imposed solution being eventually the extension of the regulations of the “Old Kingdom” over the unified provinces – bear as well several important scientific and cultural meanings. The have confirm the creation of a Romanian model for juridical development, built upon the Romanic inheritance, the adhesion to the neo-Latin juridical modernity, under its own print, consolidated and diversified by the receptions and synthesis of the juridical inter-war unification. The same unifying context, of European synthesis and national affirmation, gave birth to a Romanian school of law and a national jurisprudence. The traditions the configurated and completed have generated the landmarks of a juridical identity that have endured over time, with the specific nuances, and serve today as indispensable orientation in accepting and expressing the European integration and the generalized globalization, perceived as hybridizing and dialogue, and not as a one-sided obtrusion and deletion of national legal specificities.

The article provides a comparative analysis of the criminal legislation of Ukraine and some European countries in terms of criminalization of public culls to commit criminal offenses. The criminal codes of Austria, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, France, Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Romania have been studied. First, the system of norms on public calls in the current Criminal Code of Ukraine, the legal nature and legal features of public calls as such are outlined. Then the general scheme of public calls as an information act is given. There is a opposition of public calls as an independent act and incitement as a kind of complicity. The introduction of a new term «subsequent crimes» is justified, which will simplify theoretical research and the application of relevant norms in practice. Common features of criminalization of public calls in the named European countries are established. Their differences from the Ukrainian version of regulation are determined. They provide for universal types of public calls. These are public calls to criminal offenses in general. Less often, these are calls only to crimes of a certain gravity or a certain type. However, along with the universal norm, there are special norms. In addition, the article draws attention to the following: a) the degree of punishment of public calls, that is, the penalties contained in sanctions, b) the differentiation of responsibilities (aggravating circumstances), c) the application of the law in space. The wording of the article of the new Criminal Code of Ukraine is proposed, which will provide universal public calls to commit crimes (any crime). The preservation of certain special types of public calls is also argued.

Internet access is available on some international flights; this will become more commonplace in the future. Internet frauds abound. Already, most personal banking is performed using the Internet; it is easy to transfer funds from one account to another, including from a personal or trust account to that of a fraudster. For example, if a trustee who is both an Australian citizen and a Hong Kong permanent resident, on board an aircraft (Cathay Pacific, Virgin Atlantic, or Qantas) in international airspace flying from Hong Kong to Australia, uses a personal computer to access an Australia-based trust account and (while unauthorized) transfers money to a personal account, has the trustee committed any crime for which he/she may be arraigned in any jurisdiction? It will be argued that the answer may be 'no'. What if the trustee is flying Cathay Pacific? This is partly because the law of Hong Kong insists that Hong Kong has jurisdiction over acts committed by persons aboard Hong Kong-registered aircraft yet does not recognize Internet activity of the type indicated above as a crime if the perpetrator is in international airspace. Similarly, if the trustee is on Virgin Atlantic, the United Kingdom claims jurisdiction and holds that no crime has been committed unless a trust fund based in the home country has been plundered. However, the (Australian) Criminal Code 1995 (Cth) (hereinafter 'the Code') appears to forbid the type of fund transfer mentioned (whether the trustee is on Cathay Pacific, Virgin Atlantic, or Qantas); it thus seems at first blush that the trustee has committed a crime in Australia. The problem is that a Commonwealth prosecutor cannot (it is submitted) access the Code, because the Crimes (Aviation) Act 1991 (Cth) (promulgated earlier in time than the Code) effectively states that no non-violent act in which a person engages on an Australia-bound aircraft (Qantas or otherwise) in international airspace after takeoff from a foreign country is a crime. On such a flight, the Code is inapplicable. The maxim generalia specialibus non derogant is relevant. One solution is that concerned States should draft and sign a treaty that puts national law to one side to ensure that modern-day pirates (such as the errant trustee) are nowhere safe. Similar treaties are already in force to deal with high-seas pirates and aircraft hijackers; the meaning of piracy requires expansion in the twenty-first century.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how criminals launder money in the real estate business in Austria, Germany, Liechtenstein and Switzerland. Design/methodology/approach A qualitative content analysis of 58 semi-standardized expert interviews with both criminals and prevention experts and a quantitative survey of 184 compliance officers led to the identification of concrete techniques of money laundering in the real estate sector. Findings Real estate companies in German-speaking countries in Europe continue to be extraordinarily suitable for money laundering. In particular, they can be used for placement, layering and integration, combined with violations of the tax code. Most importantly, however, they are the vehicles for one of the very few profitable methods of laundering money. Research limitations/implications As the qualitative findings are based on semi-standardized interviews, these are limited to the 58 interviewees’ perspectives. Practical implications The identification of gaps in existing anti-money laundering mechanisms is meant to provide compliance officers, law enforcement agencies and legislators with valuable insights into how criminals operate. Originality/value While the existing literature focuses on organizations fighting money laundering and on the improvement of anti-money laundering measures, this paper describes how money launderers operate to avoid getting caught. Both prevention and criminal perspectives are taken into account.

The Swiss Civil Code (Schweizerisches Zivilgesetzbuch – ZGB) came into being on 1 January 1912 culminating the series of so called great civil codifications of continental Europe. The vast experience in the codification work within the Roman legal culture allowed the editors of the ZGB, and its author, Eugen Huber in particular, to create a truly original work that perfectly combined long legal traditions of individual Swiss cantons with the requirements of contemporary expectations, the ideas of individualism with those of social solidarity, the liberal slogans with the policy of interventionism, and the letter of law with the principles of equity and the canons of ethics. The staring point for the Swiss Civil Code was a draft authored by W. Munziger, which referred to the Zurich Code Civil, the German commercial code, the Austrian ABGB of 1861 and the Dresdener law of obligations of 1866. Another important stage was the initiative of the Swiss Juristenverein which in 1884 proposed a comparative study of all cantonal private law systems. The results of that study were to serve as a basis for the future nationwide unification of the legal system. Between 1893 and 1898 Eugen Huber developed three preliminary drafts, covering family law, succession law and rights in property. In 1900 they were published as a government project and put forward for a public discussion carried out by a 31-member expert group, with wide participation of individual citizens and interest groups. Eventually, on 10 December, the project was unanimously adopted as Schweizerisches Zivilgesetzbuch, Codice civile svizzero (ZGB) to come into force and be binding as of 1 January 1912. Among the many states drat drew on the Swiss Civil Code when drafting their own codes were Lichtenstein, Austria, Hungary, Greece, Italy and Turkey. In the latter, the ZGB was adopted as part of the reforms under Kamal Atatürk. The Swiss codification was highly valued by the civil lawyers in the Second Polish Republic.

The research analyzes the possible application and effectiveness of a monetary penalty as one of the most useful sanctions to maintain the established order of criminal justice, as well as develops constructive proposals to improve the criminal procedure legislation based on the conducted survey. To this end, the authors of the article have studied the criminal procedure legislation of Kazakhstan and legislation on administrative offenses, considered scientific opinions presented in numerous publications on relevant topics and conducted a comparative analysis of regulatory systems in Kazakhstan, Germany, Austria, the USA and the UK. As a result, the authors have established that one of the main reasons hindering the adequate implementation of criminal justice is the violation of obligations to participate in criminal proceedings by persons named in the Criminal Procedure Code of Kazakhstan. To maintain procedural discipline, the court is provided with ample opportunities in the form of coercive measures, including a monetary penalty. The authors have investigated the legal nature of a monetary penalty and compared it with administrative fines. The authors have considered grounds and application procedures for this sanction in the criminal procedure legislation of Kazakhstan and some foreign legal systems. The authors have determined the problems of its implementation caused by the slovenly legislation of a monetary penalty that impedes law enforcement activity. A comprehensive analysis allows developing proposals for improving the use of monetary penalties as measures of coercion for criminal cases heard in the court. If these proposals are enshrined in the existing regulatory framework and put into practice, they will strengthen the discipline of parties to criminal proceedings, ensure the strict observance of criminal proceedings and increase their general effectiveness. Due to its conclusions and proposals, the article demonstrates the novelty of the conducted research, the authors' original approach to the analysis of information and innovative ways to improve the existing legislative framework.

The paper examines alternatives to criminal prosecution under the Liechtenstein Criminal Procedure Code of 1988 based on normative and doctrinal sources. The interest in the topic is not accidental. This institution is one of the most developed in the legal system of the Principality. The general conditions of alternatives to criminal prosecution are analyzed, it is shown to what procedural moment and on whose initiative they can be applied. The grounds for refusing criminal prosecution against both individuals and legal entities have been investigated, since both, according to Liechtenstein law, can be given the status of the accused. It is shown that these alternatives, as a rule, have a conditional character and if the accused has not fulfilled the duties assigned to him, then criminal proceedings against him are subject to resumption. Since one of the tasks of restorative justice is to protect the rights and legitimate interests of the victim, the Liechtenstein legislator regulates in detail his participation in various conciliation procedures with the participation of the accused through the mediation of the body conducting the proceedings. The paper summarizes that the inclusion in the Liechtenstein CPC of an extensive list of alternatives to criminal prosecution is due to the desire of the legislator both to humanize criminal proceedings and to ensure compliance with reasonable deadlines for the consideration of cases. The Liechtenstein legislator differentiates alternatives to criminal prosecution against individuals and legal entities, since the legal and economic situation of these subjects of law and subjects of criminal proceedings differs in many ways. The legal consolidation and practical application of alternatives to criminal prosecution in Liechtenstein harmoniously fits into the general vector of the evolution of judicial proceedings in many European countries (France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, etc.).

The article deals with the study of the anti-doping experience of Ukraine and European countries. It considers a number of doctrinal and regulatory approaches to the understanding of doping and anti-doping rule violations and, accordingly, the importance of combating such phenomena. The article examines the provisions of international acts regulating the list of prohibited substances, doping testing, the application of sanctions for anti-doping rule violations, and formulates the conclusion on the need to improve the list of prohibited substances, which currently hinders the effectiveness of anti-doping measures. It focuses on the criminal law of Ukraine, Hungary, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Poland, Italy, and Spain, which provides for the criminal liability for doping, including its illegal production, trade, appointment, use, and forcing other persons to use it. The article describes the peculiarities of a unique approach to legal liability for doping in Austria and France, where the specified actions are regarded as fraud. The article establishes the necessity of introducing changes to Article 323 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine to improve the fight against doping in Ukraine and the expediency of harmonizing the provisions of the national legislation of Ukraine and European states with the international rules in terms of the definition of doping and the list of prohibited substances.

AbstractRecently there have been calls from Islamic nations for the creation of a crime of “defamation of religion.” Austria already has such an offense: section 188 of the Criminal Code of 1974 prohibits giving “justified offense” (berechtigtes Ärgernis) by “publicly disparag[ing] or ridicul[ing] a person who, or an object which, is the subject of veneration of a domestically established church or religious community, or a dogma, a lawful custom or a lawful institution of such a church or religious community.” This has recently been applied to secure the conviction of an activist of the right-wing Freedom Party of Austria, who announced at a semi-public seminar attended by about thirty people, including one undercover journalist, that Mohammed was a pedophile. Drawing on the law of comparable jurisdictions, this article traces the history of the provision and considers how it is applied by the courts. In this article it is contended that this provision, while rarely used, unduly restricts public discussion. At the least, the provision needs both reinterpretation and amendment; international human rights sources suggest that repeal should be seriously considered given that the existing offense of sedition is available for serious cases.

The unification of criminal legislation is the most powerful method of international law influencing on national criminal-law systems. In accordance with the comparative legal researching of the criminal liability regulation is the accumulation of law-making practice experience in counteracting of a particular crime, in our research – counteracting of coercion to wedlock. Ukraine hasn’t ratified the Council of Europe Convention on the Prevention and Combating of Violence against Women and domestic violence; Istanbul Convention (hereinafter referred to as the «Istanbul Convention») yet, but a number of its provisions have been implemented into national law. The article 37 of Istanbul convention determines a «force marriage» and determines that parties apply all legislative or other events are needed for providing of criminal responsibility of intentional behavior, that compels adult or child to marriage. European states in dominant majority determine the coercion to marriage as a separate crime. In this context, national criminal law concerning forced marriage is assessed to be fully consistent with current trends of criminal legal protection rights, individual freedom and marriage and family relations in accordance with the criminal law of foreign countries and international treaties (e.x. Istanbul Convention)). There are two positions of coercion to marriage singled out in foreign countries legislation: as an attack on personal freedom (Norway, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, France, Spain, Austria) and as an attack on marriage and family relations (Bulgaria, Belgium, Montenegro, Serbia). According to criminal law of Belgium, Austria, Sweden and Ukraine the responsibility for coercion cohabitation is provided, besides coercion to marry. Switzerland, legislator singles out a special form of coexistence – forced registration to same-sex partnership. The use of violence and threats of violence are typical and alternative methods of coercion to marriage. However, there are some exceptions as: forced marriage under the threat of breach or termination of family relationships with family members; threat of slander and use of direct slander. According to Article 151-2 of Ukrainian Criminal Code «coercion» is a crime-forming feature, which is determined by a socially dangerous and unlawful act. Forming a criminal law prohibiting of forced marriage, Ukrainian legislator doesn’t follow the list of socially dangerous methods, leaving the interpretation of this issue for law enforcement practice. In regard to the issue of punishment for coercion to marriage European legislators have unequivocal position and determine the punishment in the form of imprisonment. Appropriate legislative experience of the foreign countries should be borrowed in order to harmonize of the national coercion marriage legislation. We recognize that it is expedient to define a fine as a compulsory additional penalty for coercion, in view of sentencing courts practice. Key words: coercion to marriage, coercion to enter dormitories, criminal liability, crimes against freedom, honor and dignity of a person.

The Corona Virus Disease (COVID-19) pandemic that has plagued the world has changed the mindset, how to behave and how to act, not only in social interaction but also has influenced the law enforcement system. Development in Information Technology (IT) has found a teleconference system as a means of conducting virtual courts as a reaction to social or physical distancing movements which is one way to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Although in practice the use of a virtual court in a trial is considered capable of preventing the spread of viruses, the use of a virtual court must keep be based on applicable laws and regulations. This paper is a normative legal research with legislation approach, case approach, comparative legal approach, and conceptual approach to legal material collected through literature study and then analyzed using grammatical, systematic, and extensive interpretation methods. Based on the results of the study, several countries such as the United Kingdom, China, Australia (New South Wales) and America (New York) and Indonesia (although limited to the examination of witnesses) have applied virtual courts in the justice system. Implementation of the trial using the virtual court method by teleconference did not violate the provisions of the trial set out in the Criminal Procedure Code (KUHAP). According to the Draft Law KUHAP has accommodated the trial using the virtual court method as an embodiment of legal principles in the judiciary that is carried out quickly, simply, and at a low cost. The use of virtual court is not the first or primary choice in examining criminal cases in Indonesia, in abnormal emergency conditions due to the COVID-19 pandemic as it is today, an examination by the virtual court method is a solution so that the criminal justice system continues to run without reducing the efforts to prevent the spread of the virus. Trials using virtual court facilities continue to accommodate the human rights of victims, witnesses and defendants through their virtual presence so that a fair trial continues in the courtroom.

Human activity lies at the foundation of all social processes. The successful development of humanity as a whole depends on its orderly and organized character. An analysis of the structure of activity shows that scholars have not reached consensus on this point. The concept is described through such components as the goal, motives, interests, needs, means, result and the very process of activity. At the same time, philosophers agree that at its highest level of generality, activity is characte­rized through the prism of its goal and means. Choosing a goal to the achievement of which a person will dedicate his activities is called «goal-setting». If an idea cannot be implemented at once and requires a number of consecutive actions, the goal is specified through separate tasks referring to the stages of work. The unification of the goal and tasks into a whole constitutes «goal-setting». This methodological basis is applicable to all types of human activities, including the criminal procedure one. A scholarly definition of goal-setting in Russian criminal court proceedings is impossible without a comparative legal study of this issue in other countries. The author uses two universally recognized systems of law as a basis for this: the Anglo-Saxon system and the Romano-Germanic legal system. Besides, the author presents an analysis of the criminal procedure legislation of ex-USSR countries (Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kirgizstan), Asian countries (the PRC, Japan) and the Middle East (Turkey). As for the legislations of the Anglo-Saxon legal family (England, Wales, the USA), only the American criminal procedure legislation states its goals and tasks. The criminal procedure laws of Austria, the FRG, France, Poland do not include the goal-setting of criminal court proceedings. The criminal procedure codes of Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Kirgizstan state the tasks of criminal court proceedings (process), and the code of Belarus declares tasks of both the criminal procedure law and the criminal process. The criminal procedure legislations of the PRC, Japan, Turkey include the purpose, the goal and tasks. The conducted comparative legal analysis acts as a basis for corresponding conclusions that should be taken into consideration in the process of improving Russian criminal court proceedings.

The main principles of draft legislation concerning juvenile liability under criminal law formulated at the beginning of the Second Polish RepublicThe paper is devoted to the main principles of draft legislation concerning juvenile liability under criminal law formulated in the early days of the Second Polish Republic. The author discusses the most important legal terms and constructs of the drafts formulated by Józef Reinhold and the Codification Commission of the Republic of Poland.He demonstrates that juvenile liability under criminal law was presented in a concise and clear manner in the draft regulations, with the legislators reaching a compromise over the latest views of the proponents of the legal doctrine at the time and making a creative use of the solutions used in other countries as well as these countries’ experiences. The aim of the Polish proposals was, first of all, to reform the juvenile offenders and not to put them in prison. The reform of criminal law applying to juveniles was meant to formulate special legal regulations as well as an autonomous adjudication procedure. It should be emphasised that the suggestions formulated in the Polish legal doctrine and legislation in the inter-war period were taken into account in the Polish Criminal Code of 1932 and still constitute the basis for dealing with juveniles committing criminal offences.Hauptgrundsätze der zu Beginn der Zweiten Polnischen Republik ausgearbeiteten Gesetzesvorschläge betreffend die strafrechtliche Verantwortung MinderjährigerDie Bearbeitung betrifft die Hauptgrundsätze der Projekte betreffend die strafrechtliche Verantwortung von Minderjährigen, die in den Anfängen der Zweiten Polnischen Republik ausgearbeitet wurden. Besprochen wurden die wichtigsten Begriffe und Rechtskonstruktionen des Projektes von Józef Reinhold und der Kodifikationskommission der Republik Polen.Es wurde bewiesen, dass die strafrechtliche Verantwortung von Minderjährigen in den polnischen Entwürfen synthetisch und durchsichtig ausgedrückt wurde. Sie berücksichtigten auch die neusten Meinungen der damaligen Doktrin des Strafrechtes und nutzten kreativ die entsprechenden Lösungen und Erfahrungen anderer Staaten. Das Ziel der in Polen ausgearbeiteten Lösungen war die Besserung der minderjährigen Straftäter und nicht ihre Bestrafung mit dem Freiheitsentzug. Die Reform des Strafrechtes für Minderjährige führte zur Aussonderung spezieller rechtlicher Regulierungen und einer autonomen Entscheidungsart. Zu betonen ist, dass die in der polnischen Rechtslehre und in der Gesetzgebung zu den Anfängen der Zwischenkriegszeit des 20. Jahrhunderts ausgearbeiteten Forderungen in dem polnischen Strafgesetzbuch aus dem Jahre 1932 berücksichtigt wurden und weiterhin eine Verfahrensgrundlage bei straffälligen Minderjährigen darstellen.

From the second half of the 20th century the revisionist movement has spread among scientists, public and political figures. Publicists and scientists are known for criticizing the testimonies of concentration camp prisoners and their executioners, as well as denying the possibility of mass extermination of prisoners in terms of the technical capabilities of gas chambers.Attempts to reinterpret historical events often border on extremism and pose a threat to national security, leading to a significant deterioration in international relations. At the international level, a number of acts have been adopted indicating that the Holocaust is a fact established by the verdict of the Nuremberg Tribunal, and calling on states to reject any denial of the Holocaust. International organizations that oppose attempts to rewrite history include the Council of Europe, the United Nations, and UNESCO.At the national level, responsibility for denying and justifying the Holocaust has been established in a number of states. The first group includes states that are responsible for denying and approving the Holocaust and other crimes committed by the Nazis (Germany, France, Austria, Israel). The second group includes states that equated Nazi crimes in their legislation with crimes of communism (Hungary, Czech Republic, Lithuania). The third group consists of states that prohibit the denial and justification of any genocide (Switzerland, Luxembourg). Some states (for example, the United States) refused to introduce such bans, citing freedom of speech and belief.In 2014, the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation introduced article 354.1 "Rehabilitation of Nazism", which sets forth responsibility for denying the facts established by the Nuremberg Tribunal verdict. At the same time, the legislator should not selectively approach the protection of historical events. It would be fair to criminalize the denial of genocide and other international crimes recognized by the international community, regardless of any criteria relating to the perpetrators.

Abstract: The article gives an overview of how new legislation was drafted and adopted in Estonia after the country regained its independence. Estonia was one of the republics of the Soviet Union and became independent again in 1991. The new situation suddenly necessitated new legislation, which had to suit a democratic state with a market economy, and also be in line with the standards of developed European countries. It took ten years (1991–2001) to create the new legislation, the cornerstones of which are the Civil Code and the Commercial Code. The Civil Code was adopted in five parts: the General Part of the Civil Code Act (1994, replaced with a new version in 2001), Family Law Act (1995), Law of Property Act (1993), Law of Succession Act (1997) and Law of Obligations Act (2001); the Commercial Code was passed in 1995. The article introduces the content of all the aforementioned laws. The comparative method was the main method in drafting the new laws. The laws of Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria, France, Italy, and the Scandinavian countries, as well as the Civil Codes of the State of Louisiana and the Province of Quebec were followed as the most important examples. Internationally harmonized legislation, such as the Vienna Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods, as well as sample laws such as the Principles of European Contract Law and Principles of International Commercial Contracts were also used as sources. Drafting the new private law legislation largely fell into the period when Estonia was a candidate state to the European Union, which is why he European Union law was already taken into account when preparing the drafts. By the time Estonia became a Member State of the EU (2004), its private law legislation was in harmony with the EU requirements. Although the legislations of former USSR republics and socialist countries have developed at varying paces, the legislative analysis of Estonia, which is the subject of the article, also reflects the developments of the ‘countries in transition’ that are in the same situation and where new social and economic conditions necessitated new laws. A major objective in drafting the new laws was to make them understandable and acceptable to persons from other countries, thus paving the way for international cooperation. Résumé: L’article donne un aperçu de la manière dont l’Estonie, de nouveau indépendante, a procédé à l’élaboration et à l’adoption d’une nouvelle législation. L’Estonie est une ancienne République de l’Union soviétique qui regagna son indépendance en 1991. Dans ce nouveau contexte, le besoin s’est rapidement fait sentir d’avoir une législation qui soit adaptée à un État démocratique, dans lequel fonctionne l’économie de marché et qui satisfasse aux normes des pays développés de l’Europe. L’Estonie a mis dix ans (de 1991 à 2001) pour établir une nouvelle législation, dont les principaux textes de base sont le Code civil et le Code de commerce. Le Code civil a été adopté en cinq parties: la loi relative à la partie gènérale du Code civil (1994, remplacée par une nouvelle version en 2001), la loi sur la famille (1995), la loi sur les biens (1993), la loi sur les successions (1997) et la loi sur les obligations (2001), le Code de commer

According to Article 56 of the Russian Code of Criminal Procedure, “a judge and a juror may not be examined as a witness about the circumstances of a criminal case which they have become aware of while participating in it”. The Russian Supreme Court has interpreted this rule as imposing a categorical prohibition to examine a juror even though the defense submits and tries to prove that jurors were not impartial due to the extraneous influence and unlawful threats that they confronted in a jury room. As a result, this approach, instead of ensuring the confidentiality of jury deliberations, has been rather used to preclude the discovery of procedural irregularities in reaching a verdict. In its judgment of 7 July 2020, the Russian Constitutional Court has softened this unreasonable restriction by ruling that jurors’ witness immunity is not absolute and appellate courts must use their testimony to establish facts relating to alleged attempts to place unlawful pressure on a jury by undermining the secrecy of jury deliberations. Based on a case file, including the petition that the author of this article drafted and filed to the Russian Constitutional Court, the article reconstructs the arguments invoked by the parties in the course of constitutional proceedings and assesses the approach taken by the Russian Constitutional Court to decide the case. In particular, the court has allowed examining jurors, but only with their consent. Having studied the experience of the countries where a jury system has been present for a long time, namely the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Sri Lanka, and Myanmar, the author argues that a post-trial examination of jurors is a recognized way to ensure the right of a defendant to an impartial jury. Among other things, the foreign jurisdictions obligate a juror to inform a judge about attempts to unlawfully influence a jury, empowers a judge to determine if there are sufficient grounds for summoning jurors as witnesses, and sets standards of examination. However, none of these legal orders requires that a juror give consent for examination. Therefore, the article concludes that the integrity of jurors in Russia should be protected not by enabling them to testify before an appellate court at their discretion but by strengthening their legal immunity, which in turn will strike an optimal balance between competing constitutional values.

The article considers the essence of the category of guilt as one of the grounds for prohibiting (suspending) activities under Russian civil law. The article analyzes the shortcomings ofthe legal definition of guilt stipulated in article 401 of the civil code of the Russian Federation due to the mixing of objectivist and subjectivist concepts. Based on the analysis of the judicial practice of the application of Article 1065 of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation, a conclusion was made about the unsatisfactory state of law enforcement in establishing guilt in a person’s behavior. Monuments of Roman law are studied for the purpose of revealing the category of guilt. A brief overview of approaches to the concept of guilt in the civil legislation of a number of foreign countries and in the Model rules of European Private Law is given. The positions of the Supreme Court of Austria and the countries of the Anglo-Saxon legal family are given on this issue. The article briefly covers the integral theory developed By E. A. Kramer for the objective assessment of individuals ‘ discretion in conducting any activity that may entail adverse consequences for third parties. In connection with the special functions and purpose of the Institute of responsibility in private law and institute for the prevention of harm, the conclusion is defended that it is unacceptable to directly borrow the category of guilt from criminal law to civil law. The article substantiates the need to apply the objectivist concept of guilt in civil law as a deviation from the standard of behavior of an ordinary reasonable participant in the turnover, taking into account individual characteristics of a person. Taking into account the provisions of the current civil legislation on liability, a conclusion was made about the possibility of applying a simplified scheme of forms and types of guilt, including when deciding on the establishment of an injunction. The question of the ratio of guilt, considered from the point of view of the objectivist approach, and wrongfulness is touched upon.

In the last three decades, the dilemma of End-of-Life is one of the most disputed bio-juridical questions Italy is confronting with. By raising highly sensitive ethical, legal and political dilemmas, it has deeply divided the Italian society, the scientific community and the political arena. In the context of a raging controversy, the Italian Parliament has opted for silence. Thus, an evolutive, judicial route has marked the legal frame in response to numerous, concrete demands of recognition of the freedom of self-determination and value of dignity in the final phase of life. In this review article, an overview of the judicial evolution of the complex mosaic of end-of-life issues will be firstly offered through three cases, pillars on which the latest judicial evolution on assisted suicide lays its foundations. Secondly, the issue of assisted suicide will be singularly addressed through the examination of the Cappato case which has outlined the path for the historical ruling of the Italian Constitutional Court, no'242 of 2019 on the constitutional illegitimacy of the crime of assistance to suicide under article 580 of the Italian Criminal Code. Precisely, the Court has pointed out several, concurrent requirements in presence of which an active conduct directly connected with suicide is not criminally relevant: the autonomous and free formation of the individual will, the irreversible nature of the disease, the ongoing practice of a life-saving treatment, the intolerability of the physical or psychological sufferings and the mental capacity to self-determination. Among the numerous, emerging, interpretative questions, the latest Trentini case, in which the requirement of life-saving treatment has been interpreted as inclusive of pharmacological therapy and of every material, sanitary life-saving assistance, will be further evaluated. Conclusively, a cross section of the fragile interplay between the legislative power and the judiciary power will be depicted in reference to the main open interpretative questions related to the enforcement of the constitutional ruling and a portrait of the upcoming scenerios, as the existing legislative drafts and the prepositive referendum question, will be concisely examined.

The article deals with the main factors that caused the authorities to take the steps of fundamental changes in the civil procedural legislation of the Russian Empire. It has been pointed out that in the 1840s, Nicolas I paid attention to the problems, and in 1848 issued a resolution demanding the creation of a special institution for drafting amendments to the legislation. The study highlights the process of drafting and preparing project of the law. It is noted that the French experience (Code of 1806), as well as the achievements of Austria and Prussia in the field of civil process, were used in the drafting of the Statute, which at that time scientists critically and analytically worked on foreign regulations. It is stated that the authorities rejected the idea of changing the existing system of civil procedural legislation and decided to implement a radical reform. It is said that the experts identified and grouped the major shortcomings that led to the unsatisfactory state of civil proceedings (25 points in total), and highlighted the main progressive and necessary provisions that were included in the new Civil Procedure Statute (competitive nature of the process, publicity streamlining the effective vertical of the courts, introducing the concept of a jury). Due to the reform of 1864, civil justice was separated from criminal justice. The structure of the Statute of Civil Procedure (general provisions, four books, totaling 1460 articles) is also covered. The article deals with the differences in the implementation of the Charter (simultaneous or phased implementation). The question of the extension of the force of law in the territory of the Ukrainian provinces is raised (in 1868 the Charter came into force in Kharkiv for the first time in Ukrainian lands and later in the South and Right-Bank Ukraine).

Many of the new states that emerged or reconstituted themselves after the First World War used declarations of independence or preliminary constitutions, or both, as organic law until the adoption of a permanent constitution. The majority of those documents did not address the civil and political rights of citizens (e.g. Germany, Ireland) or did so very briefly (e.g. Austria, Czechoslovakia, Georgia, Latvia). Estonia stood out by having a whole chapter dedicated to civil rights in its preliminary constitution. The Preliminary Constitution of Estonia (valitsemise ajutine kord) was adopted by the Constituent Assembly (Asutav Kogu) on 4 June 1919, only six weeks after the Assembly first convened on 23 April 1919. The Constituent Assembly was elected and worked on the Preliminary Constitution at the time of the War of Independence between Estonia and Soviet Russia. Strong left-wing sentiment in the country’s society was reflected in the composition of the Assembly: social democrats held 41 seats, the Labour Party (tööerakond) held 30 seats, and Socialist-Revolutionaries (esseerid) held seven seats, together accounting for 65 per cent of the total 120 seats. The centrist People’s Party (rahvaerakond) led by the journalist and renowned politician Jaan Tõnisson had 25 seats, the centre-right Rural League (maaliit) led by another prominent politician and lawyer Konstantin Päts had only seven seats, the Christian People’s Party had five seats, three seats belonged to representatives of the German minority, and one seat went to the Russian minority. Similar proportions were reflected in the 15-member Constitution Committee that was elected on 24 April 1919. The first draft of the Preliminary Constitution, and of the Civil Rights Chapter as part of it, was allegedly prepared by a young legal scholar named Jüri Uluots. Uluots was a member of the Special Committee that was already convened by the Provisional Government in March of 1919 before the election of the Constituent Assembly. The Special Committee was composed of eight lawyers, each of whom was appointed by one of the major political parties. It was assigned the task to provide first drafts of the provisional and permanent constitutions. The Committee fulfilled only the first task. Due to disagreements in the Special Committee, the draft Preliminary Constitution was submitted to the Assembly without the Civil Rights Chapter. The Constituent Assembly processed the Preliminary Constitution Bill very quickly. The Assembly and its committees worked six days a week. It took about three weeks for the Constitution Committee to modify the Bill and submit it to the plenary session of the Assembly on 18 May 1919. The plenary session read the Bill three times and adopted it on 4 June 1919. The Preliminary Constitution entered into force on 9 July 1919 and was in force until 21 December 1920, when Estonia’s first Constitution entered into full force. The Committee spent considerable time on discussing the Civil Rights Chapter. Although concerns were expressed that the Committee was losing time with such discussions and suggestions were made to develop the chapter later as part of the permanent Constitution, the majority of the Committee deemed it important to also address civil rights in the Bill. Uluots, who had been elected to the Assembly as a candidate of the Rural League and was also a member of the Committee, submitted his draft Civil Rights Chapter to the Committee. Four out of eight sections in the Uluots draft found their way into the Chapter. These included equality before the law, civil and political rights and freedoms, and extraordinary restrictions. Sections regarding the right to participate in politics and the duty to obey the law (including military duty and the duty to pay taxes) were rejected at the plenary session, and the section regarding the right to private property was already omitted by the Committee. Also, the Committee preferred the social security provision proposed by the leader of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, the schoolmaster Hans Kruus, to the one included in the Uluots draft. The Committee added a new provision concerning education and rejected the right to choose occupations and engage in business proposed by a People’s Party member, the military officer Karl Einbund, and a provision entitling citizens to bring criminal charges against corrupt officials proposed by the social democrat, lawyer and journalist Johan Jans. The first section of the Uluots draft declared all citizens equal before the law. Disputes arouse over the second sentence of the provision. Uluots had proposed that all property and other rights relating to social ranks (the privileges of the nobility) should be abolished. The social democrats (Jans, the writer Karl Ast and others) demanded that privileges and titles should be abolished immediately. Their more moderate opponents (Uluots, Tõnisson, Westholm and others) feared that this would create a legal vacuum in property, inheritance and matrimonial rights. The majority of the Assembly supported the more radical approach and declared that there are no privileges and titles relating to ranks in Estonia. The law implementing the abolition was adopted a year later, in June of 1920. The school headmaster Jakob Westholm, a member of the People’s Party, and Villem Ernits, a social democrat, proposed that the Committee should include a provision concerning education. Their original proposal was scaled back by omitting the duration of mandatory elementary education and by deleting the right to free secondary and university education for talented students. The Preliminary Constitution eventually stipulated (§ 5) that education is compulsory for school age children and is free in elementary schools, and that every citizen is entitled to education in his/her mother tongue. The Committee combined civil and political rights, which were originally in two separate provisions in the Uluots draft, into one section (§ 6) stipulating that the inviolability of the person and home, secrecy of correspondence, freedom of conscience, religion, expression, language, press, assembly, association, and movement can only be restricted in accordance with the law. There were no disputes over the provision in the Committee or at the plenary session. The Committee preferred the proposal made by Kruus as the basis for further discussions on social security: “Every citizen will be guaranteed a decent standard of living according to which every citizen will have the right to receive the goods and support necessary for the satisfaction of his/her basic needs before less urgent needs of other citizens are satisfied. For that purpose, citizens must be guaranteed the obtaining of employment, the protection of motherhood and work safety, and necessary state support in the case of youth, old age, work disability and accidents.” While the last part of Kruus’ proposal was similar to Uluots’ draft and the term “decent standard of living” resembled the German menschenwürdiges Dasein (later adopted in Article 151 of the Weimar Constitution), the origin of the middle part of the provision remains unclear. The social security provision was by far the most extensively debated provision of the Chapter. The main issue was the state’s ability to fulfil its promises and whether social security should take the form of direct allowances or mandatory insurance.Views diverged even within the same parliamentary groups. The Committee replaced “will be guaranteed” with the less imperative “must be guaranteed in accordance with the law”. As a compromise, it deleted the middle part guaranteeing satisfaction of basic needs since it was deemed ‘too communist’ for many members. The plenary session supported adding the right to acquire land for cultivation and dwelling in the second sentence of the provision (§ 7) just before the adoption of the Bill. The last section in the Chapter (§ 8) provided that extraordinary restrictions of the rights and freedoms of citizens and the imposition of burdens come into force in the event of the proclamation of a state of emergency on the basis and within the limits of the corresponding laws. In the course of the discussions led by the lawyer and member of the Labour Party, Lui Olesk, the Committee turned the original general limitations clause into an emergency powers clause resembling similar provisions in the Russian Constitution of 1906 (Article 83) and the Austrian Basic Law on the General Rights of Nationals of 1867 (Article 20). Uluots urged the Committee to include protection of private property in the Bill as a safeguard against tyranny. The provision caused long and heated debates on the limits to nationalisation of private property, especially the principle of fair compensation. The provision was rejected by the majority of both the Committee and the plenary session. In anticipation of land reform, the deputies did not want to narrow down legal options for the expropriation of large estates owned mostly by the German nobility. After their defeat on the protection of private property, the right-wing members wished to protect freedom to choose an occupation and engage in business, trade, industry and agriculture. The majority refused again, arguing that during the war, there had been too much profiteering, and speculators do not deserve protection, and also that the government should have free hands to regulate industry. Without any long deliberations, the Committee also rejected the proposal to allow citizens to sue civil servants in criminal courts. Jans defended his proposal by pointing out the high level of corruption among officials and the need to provide the people with a means for self-defence. His opponents argued that Estonia had already set up administrative courts in February of 1919, providing citizens with an avenue for challenging the corrupt practices of officials. Committee and Assembly members also discussed the legal nature of the fundamental rights and freedoms included in the Bill. Some social democrats deemed it important to craft the provisions as guarantees that citizens can enforce against the state (Jans), but the majority deemed the provisions as political guidance for the legislator. Supporters of the latter view were afraid that direct enforceability of the Civil Rights Chapter would saddle the government with an unsurmountable economic burden. The state’s only directly binding obligation was probably the right to free elementary education.

The paper is devoted to issues on criminal and law characteristic of subjects of composition of a criminal offense that is provide by Article 368 of Criminal Code of Ukraine (acceptance of an offer, promise or receipt of illegal benefit by an official), and to analysis of current legislation in this field. Particular aspects of forming of legal regulation of criminal liability of officials for committing a criminal offense related to accepting an offer, promise or receiving an illegal benefit are researched. The issue of expanding the range of subjects of a criminal offense under Article 368 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine is analyzed. Experience of Criminal and Law Regulation of liability of certain categories of officials according to legislations of Austria, Norway, and Holland, Canada is analyzed. There is stressed that the analysis of the subjects of the crime under Article 368 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine and given in Note 1 to this Article allows to propose the text of the list included in Note 1 of Article 368 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine in the following wording, adding to the list of officials «Commissioner of the President of Ukraine for the Rights of the Child, Commissioner of the President of Ukraine for the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, Business Ombudsman, Chairman of the Accounting Chamber»; «Officials, in Articles 368, 3685, 369 and 382 of this Code are: 1) the President of Ukraine, … People’s Deputies of Ukraine, the Commissioner for Human Rights of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, the Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights, the Presidential Commissioner for the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, the CMU Business Ombudsman, Chairman of the Accounting Chamber, Advisers and Assistants to the President of Ukraine, Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, Prime Minister of Ukraine». There is outlined that current legislation enshrines the «duality» of the legal status of a Civil Servant. It is expressed in existence of Public Servants as a subject of Public Law, and as a private person — a subject of Private Law relations outside the performance of statutory obligations and rights. Obviously, that this legal «duality» influences on the character of Public Relations which is a subject of basic research in public administration, legal deontology, administrative and criminal law.

In the scientific article the author investigates the historical aspects of the evolution of legislation that operated in the Ukrainian lands on liability for failure to the obligation to provide support for family members, including spouses, parents, and children. In particular, it has been analyzed the content of the basic acts of family law operated in the period from Kievan Rus to independent Ukraine, such as ‘Russkaya Pravda’(‘Russian Truth’), Lithuanian Statutes of 1529, 1566, 1588, the draft codification of family law ‘Rights under which the Maloros People Are Judged’ , Code of Laws of the Russian Empire, the Galician Civil Code, the Austrian Civil Code, the first decrees of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Ukrainian SSR regulating family legal relationships, as well as the Codes of 1919, 1926, 1969 and 2002 (taking into account the changes made in 2017-2018). Based on the analysis, the author determined that the issue of liability for obligation to provide support in Ukraine received proper legal regulation only with the adoption of the current Family Code of Ukraine in 2002. The first monuments of Ukrainian law, such as ‘Russkaya Pravda’(‘Russian Truth’) and Lithuanian Statutes, unfortunately did not contain rules regulating alimony relationships between spouses, parents and children, as well as other family members. The following acts of Family Law that were in force in the Ukrainian lands defined the alimony obligations of spouses, parents and children, but did not provide for liability for their violation. The exceptions were the norms of the Galician Civil Code, which provided for the liability of the father for the non-recognition of his illegitimate child and the non-payment of amounts on the child’s support in two-, three- four times the size of amount, as well as the rules of criminal legislation of the Russian Empire and the Soviet period for determining the liability for malicious evasion of alimony payments. Unfortunately, the existing regulatory framework regulates in detail only the issue of liability for the non-fulfillment of parental support obligations in relation to children. Failure to perform other alimony duties, unfortunately, did not receive such a reaction from the state (the only exception is the malicious evasion of payment established by court decision for the maintenance of disabled parents, which is a crime).

The scientific article investigates the historical aspects of the evolution of legislation on the issues of legal regulation of the separate living of spouses that acted in the Ukrainian lands. In particular, on the basis of a study of the main acts of family law that operated in the Ukrainian lands, the author came to the conclusion that in Ukraine for a long time the legal regime of separate living of spouses existed as an alternative to the termination of marriage in accordance with the canonical norms of the Roman Catholic Church, which did not allow the termination of marriage for any reason other than the death of one of the spouses. This legal institute (called ‘weaning from the table and the lodge’) was introduced in 1563 and generally preserved in Ukraine until 1917 for the spouses of Roman Catholic creed. For the first time at the level of secular family legislation, which operated in the Ukrainian lands, the regulation of the institution of marriage separation was carried out by the Galician Civil Code of 1797. The mentioned legal regime was also mentioned by the Austrian Civil Code and the Code of Laws of the Russian Empire, the drafts of the Collection of the Little Russian Rights and the Code of Local Laws of the Western Provinces, but also in the aspect of ‘weaving from the table and lodge’ of Roman Catholic couples. At the same time, the acts of family law of Austria-Hungary provided for a judicial procedure for establishing the regime of separate living of spouses. In its current form, this legal regime was introduced in 1914 for spouses in cases where cohabitation is intolerable due to ill-treatment, abuse, dishonest behaviour, contagious or mental illness. Subsequently, the 1917 marriage decree and the 1919, 1926, and 1969 family codes, adopted during the Ukrainian SSR, did not contain rules on the separation of spouses when regulating divorce. On the other hand, the fact of spousal living was taken into account by the courts during the separation of their property. Subsequently, the institution of marriage separation was returned to the Family law of Ukraine only after the adoption of the current Family Code of Ukraine.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how criminals commit financial crimes in the real estate business in Austria, Germany, Liechtenstein and Switzerland. Design/methodology/approach A qualitative content analysis of 100 semi-standardized expert interviews with both criminals and prevention experts and a quantitative survey of 200 compliance officers led to the identification of specific money laundering techniques in the real estate sector. Findings Real estate companies in German-speaking countries in Europe continue to be extraordinarily suitable for money laundering and other financial crimes. In particular, they can be used for placement, layering and integration, as well as for violations of the tax code. Most importantly, however, they are vehicles for one of the very few profitable methods of laundering money. Research limitations/implications As the qualitative findings are based on semi-standardized interviews, they are limited to the perspectives of 100 interviewees. Practical implications The identification of gaps in existing anti-money laundering mechanisms is intended to provide compliance officers, law enforcement agencies and legislators with valuable insights into how criminals operate. Originality/value While the existing literature focuses on organizations combating money laundering and on improving anti-money laundering measures, this paper describes how money launderers operate to avoid getting caught. Both prevention and criminal perspectives are taken into account.

What creative techniques of resistance are available to a female filmmaker when she is the victim of a violent event and filmed at her most vulnerable? This article uses an autoethnographic lens to discuss my experience of a serious car crash my family and I were inadvertently involved in due to police negligence and a criminal act. Employing Creative Analytical Practice (CAP) ethnography, a reflexive form of research which recognises that the creative process, producer and product are “deeply intertwined” (Richardson, “Writing: A Method” 930), I investigate how the crash’s violent affects crippled my agency, manifested in my creative praxis and catalysed my identification of latent forms of institutionalised violence in film culture, its discourse and pedagogy that also contributed to my inertia. The article maps my process of writing a feature length screenplay during the aftermath of the crash as I set out to articulate my story of survival and resistance. Using this narrative inquiry, in which we can “investigate how we construct the world, ourselves, and others, and how standard objectifying practices...unnecessarily limit us” (Richardson, “Writing: A Method” 924), I outline how I attempted to disrupt the entrenched power structures that exist in dominant narratives of violence in film and challenge my subjugated positioning as a woman within this canon. I describe my engagement with the deconstructionist practices of writing the body and militant feminist cinema, which suggest subversive opportunities for women’s self-determination by encouraging us to embrace our exiled positioning in dominant discourse through creative experimentation, and identify some of the possibilities and limitations of this for female agency. Drawing on CAP ethnography, existentialism, film feminism, and narrative reframing, I assert that these reconstructive practices are more effective for the creative enfranchisement of women by not relegating us to the periphery of social systems and cultural forms. Instead, they enable us to speak back to violent structures in a language that has greater social access, context and impact.My strong desire to tell screen stories lies in my belief that storytelling is a crucial evolutionary mechanism of resilience. Narratives do not simply represent the social world but also have the ability to change it by enabling us to “try to figure out how to live our lives meaningfully” (Ellis 760). This conviction has been directly influenced by my personal story of trauma and survival when myself, my siblings, and our respective life partners became involved in a major car crash. Two police officers attending to a drunken brawl in an inner city park had, in their haste, left the keys in the ignition of their vehicle. We were travelling across a major intersection when the police car, which had subsequently been stolen by a man involved in the brawl – a man who was wanted on parole, had a blood alcohol level three times over the legal limit, and was driving at speeds exceeding 110kms per hour - ran a red light and crossed our path, causing us to crash into his vehicle. From the impact, the small four-wheel drive we were travelling in was catapulted metres into the air, rolling numerous times before smashing head on into oncoming traffic. My heavily pregnant sister was driving our vehicle.The incident attracted national media attention and our story became a sensationalist spectacle. Each news station reported erroneous and conflicting information, one stating that my sister had lost her unborn daughter, another even going so far as to claim my sister had died in the crash. This tabloidised, ‘if it bleeds, it leads’, culture of journalism, along with new digital technologies, encourages and facilitates the normalisation of violent acts, often inflicted on women. Moreover, in their pursuit of high-rating stories, news bodies motivate dehumanising acts of citizen journalism that see witnesses often inspired to film, rather than assist, victims involved in a violent event. Through a connection with someone working for a major news station, we discovered that leading news broadcasters had bought a tape shot by a group of men who call themselves the ‘Paparazzi of Perth’. These men were some of the first on the scene and began filming us from only a few metres away while we were still trapped upside down and unconscious in our vehicle. In the recording, the men are heard laughing and celebrating our tragedy as they realise the lucrative possibilities of the shocking imagery they are capturing as witnesses pull us out of the back of the car, and my pregnant sister incredibly frees herself from the wreckage by kicking out the window.As a female filmmaker, I saw the bitter irony of this event as the camera was now turned on me and my loved ones at our most vulnerable. In her discussion of the male gaze, a culturally sanctioned form of narrational violence against women that is ubiquitous in most mainstream media, Mulvey proposes that women are generally the passive image, trapped by the physical limits of the frame in a permanent state of powerlessness as our identity is reduced to her “to-be-looked-at-ness” (40). For a long period of time, the experience of performing the role of this commodified woman of a weaponised male gaze, along with the threat of annihilation associated with our near-death experience, immobilised my spirit. I felt I belonged “more to the dead than to the living” (Herman 34). When I eventually returned to my creative praxis, I decided to use scriptwriting as both my “mode of reasoning and a mode of representation” (Richardson, Writing Strategies 21), test whether I could work through my feelings of alienation and violation and reclaim my agency. This was a complex and harrowing task because my memories “lack[ed] verbal narrative and context” (Herman 38) and were deeply rooted in my body. Cixous confirms that for women, “writing and voice...are woven together” and “spring from the deepest layers of her psyche” (Moi 112). For many months, I struggled to write. I attempted to block out this violent ordeal and censor my self. I soon learnt, however, that my body could not be silenced and was slow to forget. As I tried to write around this experience, the trauma worked itself deeper inside of me, and my physical symptoms worsened, as did the quality of my writing.In the early version of the screenplay I found myself writing a female-centred film about violence, identity and death, using the fictional narrative to express the numbness I experienced. I wrote the female protagonist with detachment as though she were an object devoid of agency. Sartre claims that we make objects of others and of ourselves in an attempt to control the uncertainty of life and the ever-changing nature of humanity (242). Making something into an object is to deprive it of life (and death); it is our attempt to keep ourselves ‘safe’. While I recognise that the car crash’s reminder of my mortality was no doubt part of the reason why I rendered myself, and the script’s female protagonist, lifeless as agentic beings, I sensed that there were subtler operations of power and control behind my self-objectification and self-censorship, which deeply concerned me. What had influenced this dea(r)th of female agency in my creative imaginings? Why did I write my female character with such a red pen? Why did I seem so compelled to ‘kill’ her? I wanted to investigate my gender construction, the complex relationship between my scriptwriting praxis, and the context within which it is produced to discover whether I could write a different future for myself, and my female characters. Kiesinger supports “contextualizing our stories within the framework of a larger picture” (108), so as to remain open to the possibility that there might not be anything ‘wrong’ with us, per se, “but rather something very wrong with the dynamics that dominate the communicative system” (109) within which we operate: in the case of my creative praxis, the oppressive structures present in the culture of film and its pedagogy.Pulling FocusWomen are supposed to be the view and when the view talks back, it is uncomfortable.— Jane Campion (Filming Desire)It is a terrible thing to see that no one has ever taught us how to develop our vision as women neither in the history of arts nor in film schools.— Marie Mandy (Filming Desire)The democratisation of today’s media landscape through new technologies, the recent rise in female-run production companies (Zemler) in Hollywood, along with the ground-breaking #MeToo and Time’s Up movements has elevated the global consciousness of gender-based violence, and has seen the screen industry seek to redress its history of gender imbalance. While it is too early to assess the impact these developments may have on women’s standing in film, today the ‘celluloid ceiling’ still operates on multiple levels of indoctrination and control through a systemic pattern of exclusion for women that upholds the “nearly seamless dialogue among men in cinema” (Lauzen, Thumbs Down 2). Female filmmakers occupy a tenuous position of influence in the mainstream industry and things are not any better on the other side of the camera (Lauzen, The Celluloid Ceiling). For the most part, Hollywood’s male gaze and penchant for sexualising and (physically or figuratively) killing female characters, which normalises violence against women and is “almost inversely proportional to the liberation of women in society” (Mandy), continues to limit women to performing as the image rather than the agent on screen.Film funding bodies and censorship boards, mostly comprised of men, remain exceptionally averse to independent female filmmakers who go against the odds to tell their stories, which often violate taboos about femininity and radically redefine female agency through the construction of the female gaze: a narrational technique of resistance that enables reel woman to govern the point of view, imagery and action of the film (Smelik 51-52). This generally sees their films unjustly ghettoised through incongruent classification or censorship, and forced into independent or underground distribution (Sexton-Finck 165-182). Not only does censorship propose the idea that female agency is abject and dangerous and needs to be restrained, it prevents access to this important cinema by women that aims to counter the male gaze and “shield us from this type of violence” (Gillain 210). This form of ideological and institutional gatekeeping is not only enforced in the film industry, it is also insidiously (re)constituted in the epistemological construction of film discourse and pedagogy, which in their design, are still largely intrinsically gendered institutions, encoded with phallocentric signification that rejects a woman’s specificity and approach to knowledge. Drawing on my mutually informative roles as a former film student and experienced screen educator, I assert that most screen curricula in Australia still uphold entrenched androcentric norms that assume the male gaze and advocate popular cinema’s didactic three-act structure, which conditions our value systems to favour masculinity and men’s worldview. This restorative storytelling approach is argued to be fatally limiting to reel women (Smith 136; Dancyger and Rush 25) as it propagates the Enlightenment notion of a universal subjectivity, based on free will and reason, which neutralises the power structures of society (and film) and repudiates the influence of social positioning on our opportunity for agency. Moreover, through its omniscient consciousness, which seeks to efface the presence of a specific narrator, the three-act method disavows this policing of female agency and absolves any specific individual of responsibility for its structural violence (Dyer 98).By pulling focus on some of these problematic mechanisms in the hostile climate of the film industry and its spaces of learning for women, I became acutely aware of the more latent forms of violence that had conditioned my scriptwriting praxis, the ambivalence I felt towards my female identity, and my consequent gagging of the female character in the screenplay.Changing Lenses How do the specific circumstances in which we write affect what we write? How does what we write affect who we become?— Laurel Richardson (Fields of Play 1)In the beginning, there is an end. Don’t be afraid: it’s your death that is dying. Then: all the beginnings.— Helene Cixous (Cixous and Jensen 41)The discoveries I made during my process of CAP ethnography saw a strong feeling of dissidence arrive inside me. I vehemently wanted to write my way out of my subjugated state and release some of the anguish that my traumatised body was carrying around. I was drawn to militant feminist cinema and the French poststructuralist approach of ‘writing the body’ (l’ecriture feminine) given these deconstructive practices “create images and ideas that have the power to inspire to revolt against oppression and exploitation” (Moi 120). Feminist cinema’s visual treatise of writing the body through its departure from androcentric codes - its unformulaic approach to structure, plot, character and narration (De Lauretis 106) - revealed to me ways in which I could use the scriptwriting process to validate my debilitating experience of physical and psychic violence, decensor my self and move towards rejoining the living. Cixous affirms that, “by writing her self, woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into…the ailing or dead figure” (Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa 880). It became clear to me that the persistent themes of death that manifested in the first draft of the script were not, as I first suspected, me ‘rehearsing to die’, or wanting to kill off the woman inside me. I was in fact “not driven towards death but by death” (Homer 89), the close proximity to my mortality, acting as a limit, was calling for a strengthening of my life force, a rebirth of my agency (Bettelheim 36). Mansfield acknowledges that death “offers us a freedom outside of the repression and logic that dominate our daily practices of keeping ourselves in order, within the lines” (87).I challenged myself to write the uncomfortable, the unfamiliar, the unexplored and to allow myself to go to places in me that I had never before let speak by investigating my agency from a much more layered and critical perspective. This was both incredibly terrifying and liberating and enabled me to discard the agentic ‘corset’ I had previously worn in my creative praxis. Dancyger and Rush confirm that “one of the things that happens when we break out of the restorative three-act form is that the effaced narrator becomes increasingly visible and overt” (38). I experienced an invigorating feeling of empowerment through my appropriation of the female gaze in the screenplay which initially appeased some of the post-crash turmoil and general sense of injustice I was experiencing. However, I soon, found something toxic rising inside of me. Like the acrimonious feminist cinema I was immersed in – Raw (Ducournau), A Girl Walks Home at Night (Amirpour), Romance (Breillat), Trouble Every Day (Denis), Baise-Moi (Despentes and Thi), In My Skin (Van), Anatomy of Hell (Breillat) – the screenplay I had produced involved a female character turning the tables on men and using acts of revenge to satisfy her needs. Not only was I creating a highly dystopian world filled with explicit themes of suffering in the screenplay, I too existed in a displaced state of rage and ‘psychic nausea’ in my daily life (Baldick and Sartre). I became haunted by vivid flashbacks of the car crash as abject images, sounds and sensations played over and over in my mind and body like a horror movie on loop. I struggled to find the necessary clarity and counterbalance of stability required to successfully handle this type of experimentation.I do not wish to undermine the creative potential of deconstructive practices, such as writing the body and militant cinema, for female filmmakers. However, I believe my post-trauma sensitivity to visceral entrapment and spiritual violence magnifies some of the psychological and physiological risks involved. Deconstructive experimentation “happens much more easily in the realm of “texts” than in the world of human interaction” (hooks 22) and presents agentic limitations for women since it offers a “utopian vision of female creativity” (Moi 119) that is “devoid of reality...except in a poetic sense” (Moi 122). In jettisoning the restorative qualities of narrative film, new boundaries for women are inadvertently created through restricting us to “intellectual pleasure but rarely emotional pleasure” (Citron 51). Moreover, by reducing women’s agency to retaliation we are denied the opportunity for catharsis and transformation; something I desperately longed to experience in my injured state. Kaplan acknowledges this problem, arguing that female filmmakers need to move theoretically beyond deconstruction to reconstruction, “to manipulate the recognized, dominating discourses so as to begin to free ourselves through rather than beyond them (for what is there ‘beyond’?)” (Women and Film 141).A potent desire to regain a sense of connectedness and control pushed itself out from deep inside me. I yearned for a tonic to move myself and my female character to an active position, rather than a reactive one that merely repeats the victimising dynamic of mainstream film by appropriating a reversed (female) gaze and now makes women the violent victors (Kaplan, Feminism and Film 130). We have arrived at a point where we must destabilise the dominance-submission structure and “think about ways of transcending a polarity that has only brought us all pain” (Kaplan, Feminism and Film 135). I became determined to write a screen narrative that, while dealing with some of the harsh realities of humanity I had become exposed to, involved an existentialist movement towards catharsis and activity.ReframingWhen our stories break down or no longer serve us well, it is imperative that we examine the quality of the stories we are telling and actively reinvent our accounts in ways that permit us to live more fulfilling lives.— Christine Kiesinger (107)I’m frightened by life’s randomness, so I want to deal with it, make some sense of it by telling a film story. But it’s not without hope. I don’t believe in telling stories without some hope.— Susanne Bier (Thomas)Narrative reframing is underlined by the existentialist belief that our spiritual freedom is an artistic process of self-creation, dependent on our free will to organise the elements of our lives, many determined out of our control, into the subjective frame that is to be our experience of our selves and the world around us (107). As a filmmaker, I recognise the power of selective editing and composition. Narrative reframing’s demand for a rational assessment of “the degree to which we live our stories versus the degree to which our stories live us” (Kiesinger 109), helped me to understand how I could use these filmmaking skills to take a step back from my trauma so as to look at it objectively “as a text for study” (Ellis 108) and to exercise power over the creative-destructive forces it, and the deconstructive writing methods I had employed, produced. Richardson confirms the benefits of this practice, since narrative “is the universal way in which humans accommodate to finitude” (Writing Strategies 65).In the script’s development, I found my resilience lay in my capacity to imagine more positive alternatives for female agency. I focussed on writing a narrative that did not avoid life’s hardships and injustices, or require them to be “attenuated, veiled, sweetened, blunted, and falsified” (Nietzsche and Hollingdale 68), yet still involved a life-affirming sentiment. With this in mind, I reintroduced the three-act structure in the revised script as its affectivity and therapeutic denouement enabled me to experience a sense of agentic catharsis that turned “nauseous thoughts into imaginations with which it is possible to live” (Nietzsche 52). Nevertheless, I remained vigilant not to lapse into didacticism; to allow my female character to be free to transgress social conventions surrounding women’s agency. Indebted to Kaplan’s writing on the cinematic gaze, I chose to take up what she identifies as a ‘mutual gaze’; an ethical framework that enabled me to privilege the female character’s perspective and autonomy with a neutral subject-subject gaze rather than the “subject-object kind that reduces one of the parties to the place of submission” (Feminism and Film 135). I incorporated the filmic technique of the point of view (POV) shot for key narrative moments as it allows an audience to literally view the world through a character’s eyes, as well as direct address, which involves the character looking back down the lens at the viewer (us); establishing the highest level of identification between the spectator and the subject on screen.The most pertinent illustration of these significant scriptwriting changes through my engagement with narrative reframing and feminist film theory, is in the reworking of my family’s car crash which became a pivotal turning point in the final draft. In the scene, I use POV and direct address to turn the weaponised gaze back around onto the ‘paparazzi’ who are filming the spectacle. When the central (pregnant) character frees herself from the wreckage, she notices these men filming her and we see the moment from her point of view as she looks at these men laughing and revelling in the commercial potential of their mediatised act. Switching between POV and direct address, the men soon notice they have been exposed as the woman looks back down the lens at them (us) with disbelief, reproaching them (us) for daring to film her in this traumatic moment. She holds her determined gaze while they glance awkwardly back at her, until their laughter dissipates, they stop recording and appear to recognise the culpability of their actions. With these techniques of mutual gazing, I set out to humanise and empower the female victim and neutralise the power dynamic: the woman is now also a viewing agent, and the men equally perform the role of the viewed. In this creative reframing, I hope to provide an antidote to filmic violence against and/or by women as this female character reclaims her (my) experience of survival without adhering to the culture of female passivity or ressentiment.This article has examined how a serious car crash, being filmed against my will in its aftermath and the attendant damages that prevailed from this experience, catalysed a critical change of direction in my scriptwriting. The victimising event helped me recognise the manifest and latent forms of violence against women that are normalised through everyday ideological and institutional systems in film and prevent us from performing as active agents in our creative praxis. There is a critical need for more inclusive modes of practice – across the film industry, discourse and pedagogy – that are cognisant and respectful of women’s specificity and our difference to the androcentric landscape of mainstream film. We need to continue to exert pressure on changing violent mechanisms that marginalise us and ghettoise our stories. As this article has demonstrated, working outside dominant forms can enable important emancipatory opportunities for women, however, this type or deconstruction also presents risks that generally leave us powerless in everyday spaces. While I advocate that female filmmakers should look to techniques of feminist cinema for an alternative lens, we must also work within popular film to critique and subvert it, and not deny women the pleasures and political advantages of its restorative structure. By enabling female filmmakers to (re)humanise woman though encouraging empathy and compassion, this affective storytelling form has the potential to counter violence against women and mobilise female agency. Equally, CAP ethnography and narrative reframing are critical discourses for the retrieval and actualisation of female filmmakers’ agency as they allow us to contextualise our stories of resistance and survival within the framework of a larger picture of violence to gain perspective on our subjective experiences and render them as significant, informative and useful to the lives of others. This enables us to move from the isolated margins of subcultural film and discourse to reclaim our stories at the centre.ReferencesA Girl Walks Home at Night. Dir. Ana Lily Amirpour. Say Ahh Productions, 2014.Anatomy of Hell. Dir. Catherine Breillat. Tartan Films, 2004. Baise-Moi. Dirs. Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi. FilmFixx, 2000.Baldick, Robert, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Nausea. 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