The reform of the Spanish Criminal Code operated in 2015 included the possibility that legal persons could be exempt from criminal responsibility if they had provided a criminal compliance program in accordance with the conditions and requirements set forth in articles 31 bis 2 to 5 of the Spanish Criminal Code. The main discussions about these control mechanisms have been raised at the substantive level, however, we believe that the procedural connotations presented by the compliances are, if possible, of greater importance, then, after all, the main aspect is how to be accredited in a criminal process and to whom this burden corresponds. However, this is not the only procedural aspect posed by the organization and management models, hence its role in the dismissal of the case, when adopting precautionary measures, as well as in the case of the plea bargain.

Translation and adaptation to Spanish Criminal Law by Bárbara San Millán Fernández, Tirant lo Blanch, Valencia, 2021)

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.

Alexander von Humboldt-Kolleg 30 September – 2 October 2021 University of Milan and via Zoom

Abstract: The paper places in a broad doctrinal context the Chilean Supreme Court’s important rulings on art. 318 of the Penal Code (the most widely used and debated criminal figure in the context of what could very well be referred to as the "Chilean criminal battle" against the Covid-19 pandemic. Those rulings had the indisputable virtue of ruling out the criminal nature of cases of mere infringement of the curfew. In doing so, the Supreme Court made recourse to the doctrinal notions of hypothetical danger and abstract-concrete danger. The paper focuses on these concepts, cross-checking them with foreign and Chilean doctrinal sources (particularly looking into the work of the Spaniard Ángel Torío, who first came up with the notion of hypothetical danger). The paper closes by critically examining the criminalization of unauthorized crowd gatherings, a hypothesis whose criminalization under art. 318 CP was explored in obiter dicta by the aforementioned jurisprudence.

With the permission of the publisher Giuffrè Francis Lefebvre we anticipate below the abstracts of the works published in the latest issue of the journal "Rivista italiana di diritto e procedura penale" (n. 1/2021)