What is criminal law?
Criminal law is the branch of our legal system that collects and describes the conducts punishable by law. The text in which these prohibited conducts, called crimes, are catalogued and described in detail is called the Penal Code, and it contains the penalties imposed on anyone who commits any of the crimes described. Since then, our 1995 Penal Code has undergone numerous reforms that have adapted it to new types of crime, responding to situations that were unthinkable more than twenty years ago.
The purpose of Criminal Law is to protect the legal assets of individuals, as essential values for the development of the lives of citizens and society in general. There are individual legal assets such as life, health, integrity, freedom, patrimony, and supra-individual legal assets such as public health, road safety, the environment, etc. Each conduct described as a crime in the Penal Code protects a specific legal good. For example, the crime of murder protects the legal good of life, and its commission carries a specific penalty that is also included in the Penal Code. The crime of robbery protects the legal right to property, crimes of sexual abuse or aggression protect the legal right to sexual freedom, and if the victim is a minor, that of sexual indemnity. And this is the case with each of the offences defined in the Criminal Code.
But Criminal Law, as a substantive law that describes conduct, needs a channel or conduit in order to be applied. This is where criminal procedural law comes into play, the simplest way of understanding it is as the set of rules that govern the process, by virtue of which the accused is acquited or convicted for the alleged commission of a crime.
The purpose of criminal procedural law is the realisation of criminal law, so that it does not remain a dead leTer. The requirements of criminal law would be frustrated if they were not adequately complemented by criminal procedural law. We can therefore say that criminal procedural law is the channel or conduit through which criminal law will be applied, because without the process, criminal law would not be realised. The Law of Criminal Procedure is its source par excellence. It was created in 1882 by Alonso Marmnez, Minister of Grace and Justice at the time. The explanatory memorandum gives us the guidelines of what the new Criminal Procedural Law was to entail, in terms of guaranteeing fundamental rights. It was a liberal text that broke with the previous inquisitorial system, giving the accused the power to defend himself from the very moment the trial began, on equal terms with the prosecution.
At Bárbara Royo we are specialists in successfully resolving and dealing with each and every one of the criminal proceedings provided for in our laws, whatever the offence prosecuted and the type of procedure. We have an in-depth knowledge of Criminal Law and Criminal Procedural Law, and we handle each and every one of them with recognised solvency. We handle each and every offence under the Criminal Code and act in all instances up to the European Court of Human Rights, if necessary.
