Standards for the coherent application of the principles of criminal jurisdiction in relation to criminal acts committed by Lithuanian citizens and persons permanently resident in Lithuania outside the territory of Lithuania

ENThe system of principles of criminal jurisdiction was designed to ensure, as far as possible, the applicability of the criminal laws of a given sovereign state and the implementation of the principle of the inevitability of liability. For this reason, in addition to the territorial principle, other principles (flag, active personality, passive personality, protection of the interests of the State, universal, and representative) have also been developed, each with specific and distinctive content which determines the grounds and limits of their application. The awareness of these aspects and their proper implementation ensures the individuality of each jurisdictional principle and thus their coherent synergy. To hold otherwise would be to accept that the scope of application of any principle of criminal jurisdiction may be extended according to the imagination and whim of the entity applying it, based on a literal interpretation of the relevant criminal law rules. It is the beginnings of such an approach that can be identified in Lithuania, as for some time now Lithuanian citizens have been prosecuted under the Criminal Code of the Republic of Lithuania (hereinafter – Lithuanian CC, or CC) based not on the active personality principle, but on the universal principle of criminal jurisdiction for crimes committed outside the territory of Lithuania. In the case law, there are also cases where criminal acts committed by Lithuanian citizens on board a foreign vessel on the high seas are qualified as having been committed in the territory of the flag state of the vessel. These examples demonstrate that acts committed abroad by Lithuanian citizens and persons permanently residing in Lithuania are qualified incorrectly, contradictorily, and without any appreciation of the purpose and content of jurisdictional principles.In other words, instead of ensuring the coherent application of the jurisdictional principles enshrined in the CC and thus resolving the issue of the imposition of a fair sentence, Lithuania is engaged in a fundamentally contradictory and somewhat chaotic practice. Such activities may result in the resuscitation of the concept of the territoriality of the vessel, and the recognition of the primacy of the universal principle over the active personality principle and other extraterritorial jurisdictional principles enshrined in the Lithuanian CC. To prevent such situations and to draw very clear boundaries between the jurisdictional principles applicable to Lithuanian citizens and persons permanently resident in Lithuania in respect of criminal acts committed by them outside the territory of Lithuania, there is a need to analyze the most important and relevant aspects of the content of the flag, active personality and universal principles, and to clarify the mechanisms of their coherent interaction. In the context of this research, the analysis of the rules for determining the place of commission of a criminal act becomes an important issue in order to identify the cases where a criminal act is committed outside the territory of Lithuania. The analysis of the rules on the place of commission of a criminal act is also relevant to the question of their relationship with the system of principles of state criminal jurisdiction. Finally, in order to fully develop the chosen topic, it is also important to clarify the substantive nature of the condition of reciprocal criminality of the act and to draw guidelines for its regulation in the CC, which would ensure the effective and consistent application of the active personality principle. [p. 125-126].