Observation and Reflection on the Judicial Practice of the Crime of Impairing the Prevention and Treatment of Infectious Diseases / 中国医学伦理学

ABSTRACT

The crime of impairing the prevention and treatment of infectious diseases was "activated" in the COVID-19 epidemic that broke out in early 2020. However, the scope of infectious diseases involved in the relevant crimes of the Criminal Law of the People’s Republic of China before the revision was only limited to Category A infectious diseases, and the scope of application should be expanded when used for infectious diseases such as COVID-19. The revised Criminal Law "expands" the scope of infectious diseases involved in the crime from Category A to Category B controlled according to Category A, providing a legal basis for related cases, while the expressions in the new laws are repeated and ambiguous. Whether the criminal subject causes others to be infected is closely related to the sentencing of the crime, but it is still impossible to draw an exclusive conclusion on the causality leading to infection at the technical level. In summary, this paper proposed to correct the cases of inappropriate expansion of the application scope before the amendment of the Criminal Law, revise the improper expression of the new laws while cleaning up the relevant normative documents, clarify the unidentifiable part in the causal relationship of relevant cases and consider it in sentencing process.