Criminal offences with fatal results are the most represented special type of qualifying criminal offences with serious consequences in foreign criminal laws. Germany and Austria have incriminated fatal results at numerous offences, whereas Austria has incriminated them even more broadly, since it has also applied the incrimination of fatal results with regard to offences against liberty, sexual integrity and self-determination, official duty and offences caused by negligence. In case of a person’s death, fatal danger, typical of the basic criminal offence, is realised. Causality, involving victims, third parties or perpetrators of the basic criminal act, is also problematic. In Germany negligence is limited to its strictest form. Currently, German criminal law theory criticises strict punishments, which are imposed regardless of the form of culpability, since this contradicts the principle of culpability and the principle of equality. The imposed penalties in Austria are less strict and are, with regard to fatal results against public safety, determined in two stages. Slovenian legislation has essentially deviated in the regulation according to the choice of basic criminal offences, limited culpability only on negligence, the use of objective conditions of punishment and mild penalties in cases where individual offences cause the deaths of others. In its previous penal codes, Switzerland incriminated death of a person as an aggravated result but it later abolished such incriminations, because this, according to the related legislation, contradicted the principle of culpability. Today, in cases of death of a person it imposes a combined sentence for the basic offence and fatal result in concurrence.
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