What (or Maybe Who?) Is a Deceased Person and the Need to Legally Regulate the Legal Status of Deceased Persons – a Proposal for de lege ferenda Regulation
Abstract
The legal status of deceased people is not regulated in virtually any of the democratic countries on any of the inhabited continents. There are still disputes in the doctrine about whether human corpse is a thing, as well as about the admissibility of defamation of deceased persons. Moreover, in legal circulation there is no legal definition of a deceased person, but only human corpses and human remains. The Polish criminal law criminalizes insulting the corpse, ashes, the grave or other resting place of the deceased, as well as looting it, however, no punitive libel (defamation) of the deceased person is allowed, which, however, does not result from the interpretation of the provisions of art. 212 of the Criminal Code, but adopted in the jurisprudence of the case-law line advocating the teleological interpretation of a given regulation. The lack of regulation creates numerous interpretation problems in the doctrine, including to determine the subject of protection of the crime of looting a corpse or a grave. In law, and in particular in criminal law, it is unacceptable to justify the criminalization of certain behaviors by tradition or their universal condemnation without legislative specification of the elements of the structure of the offense. Therefore, the need to regulate the legal status of deceased persons should be considered necessary under the current legal status The article has interdisciplinary character on the border between philosophy and law. It consists of three parts. In the first one, the concepts of apprehending the deceased were analyzed. The second part is a review of the literature dealing with the possibility of assigning (subjective) rights to deceased persons. The last part of the article is the author’s proposal de lege ferenda regarding the way of regulating the legal situation of a deceased person in the Polish legal system.
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