Aspectos sistematicos y politico-criminales de la prevaricacion administrativa

Abstract

From the perspective of the special section of the Criminal Law, this article is a reflection upon malfeasance of office, which is now included in Articles 228 and 229 of the Chilean Penal Code, in order to determine what the interest to which the classification of such a criminal behavior tends is and if it is advisable to maintain its incrimination should there be criminal political reasons for it. Based on this background, the article examines the way in which the Preliminary Draft of the Penal Code —recently designed under the coordination of the Ministry of Justice— deals with this crime and concludes that, although such a text can be positively appraised as far as its adequacy for the subsidiarity and fragmentariness of the Penal Code is concerned, the same is not true for the way it systematizes the malfeasance of office figures or the way in which the behavior has been described, this last aspect being a clear attempt against the principle of specificity.