October 11, 2025

Are the fundamental principles of criminal responsibility of individuals general principles of law? Part 1: The principle of nullum crimen sine lege (“no crime without reference to it in the law”)

Key Points

Nullum crimen sine lege highlights that no act can be labeled as a crime unless defined by law at the time of commission.
The existence of varying definitions of crime across jurisdictions challenges the notion that general principles of law are uniform globally.
This article critically assesses the idealization of criminal law principles and their interpretation in various legal systems.
International law's influence on criminal definitions raises concerns regarding state sovereignty and legal consistency.

Abstract

The institution of individual criminal responsibility has a number of principles that characterize and clarify its content, both at the domestic and international levels. In particular, they include such principles as nullum crimen sine lege (“there is no crime without reference to it in the law”), non bis in idem (“not twice for the same thing”) and nullum poena sine lege (“there is no punishment without the law”). The importance of these principles is great, but their one-sided idealization has led academic research to the emergence of the conclusions that such principles have the same content within any legal system, and therefore are general principles of law, in the sense of Article 38(c) of the Statute of the International Court of Justice. However, the modern consolidation of the content of these principles in the criminal law of different states and in international law does not give grounds to agree with this statement. In this article, the main reasoning to support this point is focused on the principle of nullum crimen sine lege, according to which an act is only considered a crime of at the time it was committed, it was already defined as such by the criminal law of the state. The fact is that the definitions of crime (and the grounds for criminal liability) that exist so far in the national law of the vast majority of states come into direct conflict with the recognition of international law’s ability to independently criminalize certain acts of individuals. As a result, an act that is not a crime according to the criminal law of the given state may turn out to be a crime. Since the general principles of law in their content must coincide with each other in both national and international law, the article concludes that at the present stage the principle nullum crimen sine lege cannot be considered as one.

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