Conceptual Misunderstanding and Correction:from"Compliance with Criminal Norms"to"Compliance with Criminal Law"
The corporate criminal compliance reform is a practical attempt for the state and enterprises to jointly participate in governance,which has also brought about innovation in legal thinking.In March 2020,the Supreme People's Procuratorate led the exploration of the localization practice of introducing corporate compliance into China's criminal procedure sys-tem,and in the following few years,the scope of the compliance reform pilot of the enterprises involved has continued to expand,and has now been fully rolled out in the procuratorial organs across the country.Subsequently,the court system also began to participate in the practice of criminal compliance.However,there is a mismatch between the name and the meaning in the use of the well-known concept of compliance with criminal norms in China.Criminal norms in the semantics of criminal policy should refer to the law directly related to corporate criminal lia-bility,that is,criminal law,rather than more generalized and broad norms and regulations.Compliance rectification is also to prevent and reduce criminal offenses rather than other illegal and irregular behaviors.Therefore,there is an obvious inconsistency between the name and the referred meaning when using expressions such as"compliance with norms"instead of"compli-ance with law".In terms of the origin and evolution of the term,the concept of criminal compli-ance in the legal field has evolved from the non-legal concept of corporate compliance.Compli-ance originated from the field of corporate governance overseas.It refers to a series of internal procedures taken by enterprises to prevent employees from violating laws,regulations,rules and guidelines,etc.,covering not only laws but also broader regulations.To maintain the consis-tency of concepts,domestic scholars use compliance with criminal norms to express the criminal law meaning of compliance,which refers to the various responses made by criminal law and criminal procedural law to the demand for promoting corporate compliance,but the connotation of norms to comply with has actually changed in this process.The investigation of the concept of compliance overseas also reveals that it has multiple meanings.Its original vocabulary has sub-stantial differences that need to be distinguished at two different levels:corporate governance and criminal law,and compliance is only a sub-concept rather than a parent concept in the o-verseas criminal legal system.Compliance is just a new factor in the traditional legal system.Therefore,the correct approach is not to discuss how to use law to motivate and promote compli-ance from the perspective of corporate governance but to start from the original concept of law and discuss how to incorporate compliance,a new development,into a relatively sound legal frame-work.In the future,the concept of"compliance with criminal norms"should be replaced by"compliance with criminal law"to clarify the boundary between law and norm so that its connota-tion can be more accurately and reasonably integrated into the existing legal knowledge system.
NETL
NSTL
万方数据
