Does the act of mining consensual constitute the crime of illegal mining?
A company in Changsha, Hunan Province has a quarry, and has gone through the procedures for the transfer of mineral resources and the mining right license in accordance with the law. In order to maintain stability, the county ** instructed the natural resources department to re-demarcate the quarrying area for Company A, but the change did not change the mining license. Company A strictly follows the time of the original mining license and the re-demarcated scope of mining. In 2019, the mining license expired and Company A stopped mining.
But now, the public security organs have opened a case for investigation for the crime of illegal mining, and they want to investigate the criminal responsibility of the person in charge of Company A. Do you think Company A is wronged?Is it fair that the company mines according to this range, but now faces the risk of a criminal offense?
There is a principle of exculpation in the criminal law, which is called the interest of administrative trust, which means that the act carried out by the perpetrator based on the trust of ** is not criminally punishable.
To put it in layman's terms, Company A's mining behavior was carried out under the permission of **, which is enough for Company A to have reasonable trust that its mining behavior is legal and does not subjectively have the intention of illegal mining. To put it more bluntly, it can't be said or not, it was the re-demarcation of the mining area at the beginning, which is essentially an administrative license, and now it is said that this kind of behavior is an illegal mining crime, which does not make sense in legal theory.