The article aims to evaluate an eventual express regulation of the harm principle in the future Chilean Constitution. The article starts by examining the background, meaning and regulation of this principle. Then, it addresses its relationship with other principles that limit the ius puniendi, as well as the importance of its regulation as an autonomous principle. Likewise, the text refers to the harm principle as the basis of an adequate legislative technique in criminal matters. The article concludes that an explicit regulation of this principle in the new Chilean Constitution, through an immediate and clear formulation, would be a great step forward, among other things due to its character of limiting the action of both the legislator and the judge in the punitive field.
The feature film on the arrest warrant issued against the former president of the Catalan Generalitat Carles Puigdemont saw a new turning point with its application by the Italian judicial authorities, which, considering the euro-order effective, arrested Puigdemont in Sardinia, only to release it later. The chaos of this new episode is of such magnitude that the Italian judge deemed it appropriate to send a clarifying note on the validity of the European order. There are three issues under discussion: the first relates to the extent of the immunity; the second, probably the most complex, concerns the suspension of the euro-order; the third, still unexplored, addresses the so-called double incrimination, i.e. whether the conduct put in place by the former President, qualified by the Spanish Supreme Court as a crime of sedition, also constitutes a crime in Italy.
Theoretical reflection on the proper methods for interpreting penal statutes has been rather insensitive to the interpretative challenge posed by the syntactic ambiguity eventually exhibited by the given legal text. In the realm of Chilean criminal law, one finds a clear example of this in the formulation of the rule of “superior responsibility” under art. 35 of Act No. 20357. By overlooking this ambiguity, one could be led to the assumption that the rule in question would only apply to superiors occupying military positions. The analysis of the specifically syntactic base of the potential indetermination of the legal provision can highlight the semantic and pragmatic factors that ought to contribute to the resolution of that ambiguity. The thus achieved interpretation results in the rule being also applicable to superiors occupying non-military positions.