The historical course of criminal responsibility of legal entities in the criminal system of Iran, Afghanistan and England

One of the basic issues in criminal law is criminal liability, which has always been one of the critical concerns of any criminal justice systems in order to ensure justice and maintain order in society. With constant development of international economic transactions, criminal responsibility provided the ground for entry of some new factors in the field of criminal law. One of the most important cases was the activities of legal persons, and the crimes committed by these persons which obliged the legislators to take the necessary measure to respond the criminal offences. Although there are still many ambiguities regarding the responsibility of legal persons; but the question still remains open that which criminal justice system recognized the criminal liability of legal persons for the first time, which became the basis for the development of other criminal justice systems to further work on the criminal offences of the legal persons. Using the analytical-descriptive methodology, besides answering this question, this research will also scrutinize the evolution of regulating the criminal liability of legal persons and also how this concept was introduced to the criminal literature of Iran, Afghanistan and England? It seems that the criminalization begins with the violation of a social value. The same hypothesis is true for legal persons. i.e., it was the companies that committed crimes for their interests, and as a consequence, the legislators regulated the criminal liabilities for legal persons in order to prevent crimes and to punish the perpetrators. As the evidences indicate, certain behaviors of the legal persons are criminalized in English Penal System for the first time, later adopted by Iran and finally to Afghanistan's penal law.