المسؤولية الجزائية الناشئة عن جرائم الاعتداء على الطاقة الكهربائية ( دراسة مقارنة )

Criminal liability arising from crimes of assault on electrical energy ( A comparative study)

Abstract
lectricity is the most important renewable energy used in the world. It is the backbone of modern life, a fundamental pillar and a tool that drives many activities and events. Its consumption is a criterion for the progress of countries and an indicator of social welfare. It is also the primary source of sustainable development and economic development, in addition to being the basic and important activity in daily life, especially economic life; being the main tributary of agriculture and industry, and no individual in society can do without it; because the individual’s consumption of electricity is an important criterion in assessing the welfare of the individual and society, and therefore it is necessary to advance the reality of the country because it is the primary driver of the economy and various activities in it.
Despite the importance of electrical energy and its major role, the electrical energy sector suffers from many problems and obstacles that have led to its inability to meet the growing demand and thus its inability to provide the required quantities for consumption of all kinds (domestic, agricultural, industrial, commercial, and governmental); due to the damages it has suffered as a result of political, security, and economic instability throughout the past decades, as providing electricity is one of the most prominent difficulties and challenges facing successive governments and the population since the beginning of the nineties of the last century and is still ongoing until now. Among the most prominent problems that accompanied the electrical energy sector and compromised its safety, and contributed to the fluctuation of electrical energy and the failure to achieve the maximum benefit from it, are the attacks on it directly or indirectly. Hardly a year goes by without hearing about the theft of electricity or sabotage affecting one of its infrastructure or a violation of the prohibitions of the towers transmitting electrical energy. These attacks are due to many different reasons that may be cognitive, legal, technical, political, or climatic… etc. Despite the development and the countless technologies and methods that contribute to the development and improvement of electrical energy, these attacks are still ongoing.
With all these obstacles that still accompany the electric power facility, we do not find sufficient protection for it under Iraqi legislation compared to other laws in other countries. We did not find in Iraqi legislation special legal texts to protect electric power in particular. Rather, all the texts mentioned were either within the framework of the general penal code to protect electric power jointly with other public funds, such as the crime of sabotaging electric power stations, the crime of stealing electricity, and theft of electric power components, which were criminalized based on the Iraqi Penal Code No. (111) of 1996, as amended, or in criminal texts specific to other crimes in which electric power crimes were implicitly included, such as the crime of bombing electric power towers, which was classified as a terrorist crime subject to the provisions of Terrorism Law No. No. (13) of 2005 as amended , as amended, and the crime of Encroachment on the prohibitions of electric power towers subject to the provisions of the Public Roads Law No. (35) of 2002 as amended, and the decision of the dissolved Revolutionary Command Council to remove encroachments on state and municipal properties No. No. (154) of 2001 AD , in addition to the deficiency of these provisions and the weakness of their application, as we did not find any penal procedures related to initiating lawsuits related to the electric power sector or trial and the lack of specialized courts for these crimes. All these matters led to diligence, confusion and instability on a single position in dealing with behaviors affecting electric power.
Therefore, based on what was mentioned, we decided to examine this topic in some detail and take a serious stand in order to reach logical solutions for it, keeping in mind what was stated by jurisprudence and the judiciary, and the texts of the Iraqi legislation in force related to this topic and comparing them with their counterparts in some Arab and foreign legislations. In order to cover the research topic, we divided the research into three chapters. We devoted the first to the concept of crimes of assault on electrical energy, and in the second we addressed the objective provisions of criminal liability for crimes of assault on electrical energy, and in the third we examined the effects of criminal liability arising from crimes of assault on electrical energy.