On December 29, 2023, the last working day of this year, the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress deliberated and passed the amendments to the Company Law, the Charity Law and the Criminal Law. Careful people will find that the same law is amended, but the three laws are published in different terms.
The Company Law reads: "The Company Law of the People's Republic of China ......The amendment was adopted ......”
The Charity Law reads: "The Decision of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress on Amending the Charity Law of the People's Republic of China ......Passed".
The expression of the Criminal Law is: "Amendment (12) to the Criminal Law of the People's Republic of China"....Passed".”
This inevitably makes people feel confused: why is there such a difference, and is there any mystery in it?
In fact, these different expressions are only issues at the technical level of legislation, and there is nothing particularly mysterious. This article will briefly explain this problem.
As we know, legislative activities mainly include four aspects: enactment, amendment, repeal, and interpretation of laws. As a special social norm, the implementation of the law is guaranteed by the coercive power of the state, so it should be kept as stable as possible, and it cannot be changed overnight, which makes people confused. But as a legal proverb goes, "Once a law is made, it lags behind." "This is a paradox that the law cannot overcome, and in order to make the law as applicable as possible, it needs to be amended appropriately after it has been enacted.
In general, there are two types of legal amendments in our country: amendments and amendments. Specifically, the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress passed the three legal amendments, the "Charity Law" and the "Criminal Law" are amendments, and the "Company Law" is the amendment. The difference between the two is that an amendment is a minor modification of a single or partial provision of the existing law;The amendment is a comprehensive revision of the existing law. To put it simply, a correction is a minor repair, and a revision is a major overhaul.
The same law may be amended and amended at the same time. Taking the Company Law as an example, it was enacted and promulgated on December 29, 1993, and the current revision on December 29, 2023 is exactly 30 years, during which the Company Law has been amended a total of 6 times. Four of them were amendments: the first amendment on December 25, 1999, the second amendment on August 28, 2004, the third amendment on December 28, 2013, and the fourth amendment on October 26, 2018. There are two other revisions: the first revision on October 27, 2005 and the second revision on December 29, 2023.
In order to maintain the stability of the law as much as possible, the method of amending the law is mainly amendments, which can be seen from the comparison of the number of amendments and revisions to the Company Law.
Another typical example is the Penal Code. It has been nearly 45 years since the promulgation of our Penal Code in 1979, with only one revision in 1997 and 12 amendments since then. Although there is a strong call in the legal profession and society for a comprehensive revision of the Criminal Law, and many people have even suggested that the Civil Code should be used as a reference to the Criminal Code to reformulate a Criminal Code, these have not been included in the legislative plan of the current NPC. This reflects the State's particularly cautious approach to the revision of the Penal Code, which is a very severe law that deprives a person of his liberty and even his life.
The Charity Law and the Criminal Law are both amended this time, so why is the form of the amendment to the Charity Law of the People's Republic of China in the form of the Decision of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress on Amending the Charity Law of the People's Republic of China, while the form of the Criminal Law is the Amendment (12) to the Criminal Law of the People's Republic of China?
This is because the amendment of China's laws is divided into two forms, one is the amendment of the law and the other is the decision to amend the law. The difference between the two is that if the amendment is adopted, the amendment shall be published separately, and the original legal text shall not be re-published;and where the form of a revision decision is adopted, the revised legal text is to be republished on the basis of the revision decision.
What laws do the amendments to and the decisions to amend the laws apply?Judging from the practice of law amendment, the amendment decision applies to ordinary laws, while the amendment applies to laws of high importance. In addition to the Amendment to the Criminal Code mentioned in this article, there is also the Constitutional Amendment. This is also to maintain the stability of the provisions.
It is for this reason that the addition or deletion of legal provisions by the amendment does not change the serial number of the original legal provisions. The additional provisions are listed after the most relevant provisions and are expressed as follows: "Article 1", "Article 2", and so on. Those who are familiar with the provisions of the criminal law are familiar with these things. Of particular note is article 199 of the Criminal Law, which reads "(deleted)". Although this article has been deleted, the article number has been retained, the purpose of which is to maintain the stability of the article number.