Signs that qualify the composition of crimes related to illegal deprivation of liberty: concepts and system

Abstract

The purpose of the article was to clarify the legal nature and define the concept of features that qualify crimes that are associated with illegal deprivation of liberty and to present their totality provided by the criminal law in the form of a system based on the classification and grouping. Achieving this goal was facilitated by the answers to the following questions: 1) what is the legally established set of features that qualify crimes related to illegal deprivation of liberty offered by the current Criminal Code of Ukraine? 2) what should be understood by the features that qualify a criminal offense and what characteristic features are characteristic of this concept? 3) are the signs established in the Criminal Code of Ukraine that qualify crimes related to illegal deprivation of liberty assigned with these signs? 4) how can such signs be classified or grouped, taking into account the answers to the previous questions? 5) what criminal-legal significance will the given classifications of signs have. Answering the indicated questions, the author assumed that the features that qualify a criminal offense act as a means of differentiating criminal responsibility and in this connection are immanently endowed with features that are characteristic of this instrument of criminal law regulation. They do not create a new criminal law prohibition, instead they change the specific manifestation of its criminal illegality and, accordingly, the punishment of the committed. It was established that the essential and necessary signs of «signs that qualify a criminal offense» are that they: - are contained directly in the criminal law; - are included in the structure of the composition of the criminal offense; - «transform» the basic composition into a qualified one; - is a generalized designation of the circumstances of the commission of a criminal offense; - affect the dangerousness of the committed act, which causes an independent criminal sanction, which is reflected in an independent structural part of the criminal law; - demand a criminal-legal assessment of the offense committed under another structural part of the criminal law, different from the one containing the basic composition of the offense; - have an imperative character, i.e. they must be applied. The paper concludes that the most important criminal-legal significance for criminal-legal qualification is the grouping of features that qualify crimes related to illegal deprivation of liberty into such groups, which are separated according to those qualification rules, from the whole set of various classifications. which should be applied for the legal evaluation of the committed.