Whick “political party” should be accused and eventually sentenced?

Abstract

The application of the corporate criminal liability model to a political party, according to art. 31 bis et seq. of the Spanish Criminal Code (Organic Law 7/2012, December 27th), creates both substantive and procedural difficulties, due to the characteristics of such organizations. Therefore, it is necessary to adapt the corporate criminal liability system to the specific characteristics of this political parties. In this article, we are going to focus on a nuclear element of this model: the delimitation of the concept “political party”, to which criminal responsibility could be attributed, when it accepts criminal practices inside its structure. Theoretically, this question shouldn’t generate too many problems, because just when a political party is registered, it can be considered as such. However, in practice, this circumstance can lead to the sentence of a political party as a whole, when in fact, one of its “subunits” has provided coverage to certain criminal practices.