Criminal Responsibility of Political Parties as Legal Entities

Most countries in the world have introduced criminal responsibility of legal entities, while at the same time in many countries political parties have a status of a legal entity, which allows to treat them like corporations. The expansion of criminal liability of legal persons has enabled to hold political parties criminally liable, unless there is a law that provides an exemption for them. This new possibility to punish political parties has been applied for the first time in March 2014 when a Croatian court convicted and sentenced a major political party (Croatian Democratic Union) for corruption. After determining that the crimes committed resulted in damaging state-owned companies for more than €9, 5 million, the Court found that CDU illegally obtained nearly €5, 2 million, part of which was taken by the party president Ivo Sanader (about €2 million). This case shall be used for assessing the legal, political and criminological aspects of criminal responsibility of political parties as legal entities. After a brief overview of historical developments of criminal responsibility of legal entities, this paper will compare how different theoretical concepts of liability could be applied to political parties and evaluate their consequences. The relevant theories of criminal responsibility of legal entities whose applicability to political parties are subject to evaluation are the following: strict liability, vicarious liability, identification or alter ego model, representation model, aggregation theory, corporate culture theory, theory of organisational fault and compliance, theory of wilful blindness and benefit theory.