The Permanency Rule in the Ethiopian Criminal Code of 2004. Consequences for the Defintion of Grave Willful Injury Crimes

Scientific Essay from the year 2021 in the subject Law - Comparative Legal Systems, Comparative Law, , course: law, language: English, abstract: This scientific essay deals with the Ethiopian criminal code of 2004 and its problematic definition of bodily injury crimes due to the permanency rule. Act of bodily injury is commonly understood as crime against physical integrity and human dignity. Nonetheless, assessing different jurisdictions' experiences reveals, though they have some criteria in common, they employ different standards and criteria to define what constitutes bodily injury crime and to classify bodily injury crimes, particularly into grave bodily injury crimes and other types of bodily injury crimes. Ethiopian criminal code of 2004 covers crime of bodily injury in its chapter II of book V under a caption 'crimes against person and health'. It is verbatim copy of chapter 2 of book V of Ethiopian penal code of 1957. Though, even closing the eyes to historical glimpse, since 1957 inflicting any kind of bodily injury is crime against person and health, reviewing practices point out that there is no well established jurisprudence to define and to classify bodily injury crimes into grave willful injury crime and other kind of bodily injury crimes.