Legislative Punitiveness In Response to the Specific Military Offences

Throughout the history of criminal law, various approaches have been adopted in response to the crime among which the criminal model with emphasis on punitiveness has been welcomed by criminal policymakers and has been of particular importance for various reasons. The present study aims to investigate the different dimensions of this approach in the Armed Forces Penal Code. In this research, the subject has been studied, described and analyzed through a descriptive-analytical method using available library sources. Also, the collected data has been analyzed qualitatively and based on the researcher’s inference from sources and texts. Findings indicate that not only punitiveness does increase criminalization and punishment, but also it paves the way for the development and deepening of criminal interventions to the extent that the legislature has adopted a purely punitive approach toward specific military offenses and those covered by the Armed Forces Penal Code. The research results show that the following are the most important components of punitiveness: extreme criminalization, inflation of crimes predicted by law, extreme recourse to repressive and disproportionate punishments, the use of vague and undefined words in the law that allows different interpretations and covers different people, limiting or eliminating the mitigating factors. The study of the Armed Forces Penal Code reveals the manifestations of punitiveness in all stages, especially criminalization and punishment. One of the examples confirming such a punitive approach is the legislature’s maximum use of “Moharebeh” to the extent that there are the terms “… is considered as Moharebeh” or “… is sentenced to Moharebeh” in nearly 90 articles of this code. Also, the sentence of imprisonment has been mentioned in about 90 articles of this code which clearly indicates the legislature’s strictness in punitiveness. It seems that the legislator has been dealt with a kind of extremist in response to the specific military offenses due to the irrational and unreasonable similarity between and such crimes and the meaning of Moharebeh.