Criminal Protection of Helpless Persons in the Light of the Provisions of KZ-1

With the increasing interest of crime policy for crime victims and the particular attention paid to vulnerable groups of victims, the author explores how the current Slovenian Criminal Code (KZ-1) treats helpless persons as victims of crime. The amendment KZ-1C added two new criminal offences that are aggravated if committed against helpless person, which increased the set of legal provisions containing the term »helpless person«. Since the substantive scope of this concept has not been clarified in theory and case law, the author focuses on the analysis of individual provisions of the Criminal Code. Using established methods of interpretation, the author identifies the content of normative element »helpless person« which is increasingly used by the legislator in the statutory provisions and which has to be fulfilled to meet a definition of an offence in the general structure of criminal offence.

Keywords: criminal law, substantive criminal law, helpless person, normative element of criminal offence.