The criminal law is that part of the public law that provides criminal penalties to anyone who commits the conduct, active or passive, which the law recognizes as a crime. Any offence is such that only if established and recognized by lawAccording to the principle of definiteness, the sentence must be understandable at this point make it clear to all parties what are the behaviours that are legitimate and which ones are illegal.
There must be a proportion between the punishment and the crime, the punishment shall not be disproportionate to the offence committed (principle of proportionality).
The criminal law is only the ordinary law enacted by parliament, any law of lower rank is valid only for mere technical specifications (for example, to compile what are the substances drugs).
The criminal law is only valid for the future, you can not punish a fact happened before the entry into force of the law, then the criminal law has no retroactive effect.
In the Italian criminal law, any new crime and safety measures must be introduced in the criminal code by modifying the organic (principle of the reserve of the code). The State, prohibiting certain human behaviors (crimes), by means of a threat of a specific sanction afflittiva (worth), protecting the fundamental values of a people. And it is the type of sanction, 'worth', that distinguishes the crime, the criminal offence, the tort and the administrative offence. And yet, it is the type of sanction, that is, 'worth', to distinguish the criminal law from the civil and administrative. The sanction resulting from the violation of a penal precept is worth, shape or varying degrees of severity depending on the offence.
Criminal offences are divided in crimes and misdemeanors: the first are those offences which can carry the penalty of life imprisonment, imprisonment, a fine, while misdemeanors are those offences which can carry the penalty of arrest or fine.
The provision of criminal law is then composed from the precept, which prohibits a particular human behavior, and by the sanction which provides for the consequences for the violation of the precept. It is clear that, even if some crimes are generally the same in the different states, the penalties may be different, as well as many crimes are different from state to State, in the sense that you assign a different severity to the same behaviour anti-social is that every state punishes certain behaviors but not some of the others, all according to the evolution of law and society in the world. The nature of the criminal standard penalty is subject, in Italy, of questions old. 'At first, the response is oriented in the direction of feel these effects only legal in most, expressly denominated criminal. we need to consider the penal effect expressly named in this way: the penis, and today we can, without doubt, add the measures of yet From this premise, it is the idea according to which the constitutional guarantees laid down for the imposition of the penalty apply to all the laws that have consequences in more as a reaction to what they should not do themselves, i.e, as a reaction to the offence as such - there may be, and there are other goals, but along the bottom, which is essential, as set out above. Not form part of the “criminal”, so to speak, the legal effects in a bad part aimed at refreshment, economic, or moral, of the damage caused by the tort: damages, repair, restoration of the status quo ante'. The case-law of the Strasbourg Court on several occasions has stated the nature essentially criminal for the purposes of the application of the guarantees of due process (art. six of the ECHR), of sanctions, while formally classified as administrative in the internal order of the States, as long as it is detected at least one of the criteria (the so-called “criteria Engel”) processed by the same law supranational for this redevelopment. Why a sanction should be considered substantially criminal under the ECHR must present at least one of these characters:"the rule which imposes the administrative sanction should apply to the generality of the subsidiaries, and to pursue a preventive, repressive and punitive, and not merely reparation or the penalty likely to be imposed must lead to the author of the crime, a significant sacrifice, even the purely economic, and not consisting in deprivation of liberty".
