The Rights Guaranteed to All Human Beings - Dissertation Example

The ability of the state to condemn, restrict, and even completely take away the liberty of a person is probably one of the most awesome powers that the state may exercise, and rightfully so. The exercise of this coercive power exerts great impact upon the lives of individuals who are tried, convicted, and sentenced under the state’s justice system, that misuse or abuse of such power is capable of causing grave injustice to persons whose lives and reputations would have been irreversibly destroyed.

A country’s criminal law refers to that set of laws that are imposed upon individuals for mandatory compliance. The purpose of promulgating and enforcing provisions of criminal law is to establish and maintain peace and order in a society, in order to create an environment conducive to progress and prosperous co-existence among the nation’s citizenry. In order to compel compliance, the criminal law system is also a penal system, signifying that its provisions decree a set of penalties for offenders of the law, the severity of which depends upon the gravity of the offense and the grievousness of the harm done.

The provisions of criminal law define those offences that individuals may be held liable for; the definition and description of the important elements of these offences are extremely vital to the fairness and effectiveness of the law because all those upon whom the law is enforced are entitled to prior notice before the heavy burden of the law is made to apply to them. Prior notice is important for a fair and just application of the law because individuals must first be informed of those offences for which they may be punished, in order for them to comply with and therefore avoid such punishment.

This poses a little problem where what the law forbids is the criminal act, because all the individual has to do is to abstain from engaging in such criminal acts in order to avoid sanction.There may arise a dilemma, however, where what is punished is an omission to do a certain act. The omission is the failure to perform an act that is mandated by law.