Mistake of Fact or Mistake of Law as a Ground for Excluding the Mental Element
The article deals with the mistake of fact and mistake of law, specified in Art. 32 of the Rome Statute. Based on an analysis of the provisions of the Rome Statute, Elements of Crimes and decisions of the International Criminal Court, the author characterizes mistake of fact and mistake of law as ground for excluding the criminal responsibility for committing Universal crime.The author studies the problems associated with taking into account the mistake of fact and mistake of law using the comparative method. It is concluded that the obvious and similar for all national systems of criminal justice rules on mistake of fact are partly based on objective imputation - it is not required that a person makes judgments about objective elements, it is enough for him to be aware of their possibility. With regard to mistake of law, the International Criminal Court used the “layman” test, borrowing it from the German doctrine of mens rea.