Complicity in Polish Criminal Law

Abstract

The  article  presents  the  basic  information  about  complicity  in  Polish  criminal  law.  The  main  characteristics  of  the Polish  construction  of  complicity  and  the  main  interpretation problems  have  been  presented  against  the  background  of  model  solutions  referring  to  criminal  complicity  in  European
 criminal  law.  The  article  comprises  the  genesis  of  complicity  in  Polish  criminal  law,  the  main  advantages  of  the employed  construction,  the  most  important  of  which  is  the  breaking  off  with  the  accessory  responsibility  of  the  instigator  and  auxiliary.  The  text  also  comprises  a short  characteristics  of  the  individual  forms,  principal  and  non-principal,  of  the  commission  of  an  offence  in  the  Polish  criminal  law.  The  problem  of  distinguishing  individual  forms  of  the  commission  of  an  offence  using  different  existing  doctrinal  and  judicial  theories  has  also  been  discussed.  Separate  remarks  have  been  devoted  to  the  issues  of  punishment  for  complicity  and  to  the  lack  of  consistency  in  criminal  responsibility  in  that  respect,  which  according  to  the  author,  though  it  does  not  infringe  on  the  principle  of  lack  of  accessory  responsibility  in  the  qualitative  sense,  may  however  be  perceived  as  introducing  such responsibility  in  the  quantitative  sense  in  the  field  of  punishment  imposition.