Juridicalblog.net

Along the Family Code, parents have to maintain their children during their childhood all the way to the time they’ll be able to make their living alone. This usually lasts till the age of 18, sometimes longer, sometimes the obligation to provide maintenance to their children finishes sooner.
Parents, who are divorced, usually live separately, so their children live with one of them and the other parent have to pay every month alimony, but there’re lots of parents, who don’t do that. They either pay alimony irregularly or don’t pay it at all. In many cases this caused shortage of money of a parent whom children are living with, which have to be compensated with the help of a local welfare institution, that pay financial aid instead of the alimony of the other parent. This aid is later enforced against a parent, who doesn’t pay alimony.
Along the Penal Code, parents, who don’t pay alimony at least 6 months, commit a crime called Neglect of maintenance duty. Everyone who commits such crime is threatened with a punishment from 6 months to 3 years. The Penal Code distinquishes between a person who doesn’t pay alimony and the one, who tries to dodge paying alimony. The second case is punished more strictly.
The crime like this, is very frequent in my country, so I regularly supervise investigation at least against 4 perpetrators every month, and so do all my colleagues.
The Penal Code concedes impunity to people accused of such crime, who pay outstanding alimony during criminal proceeding by the time the sentence is imposed by court, so a lot of accused do this and they are neither found guilty nor sentenced. Their case is stopped during a preparatory proceeding by prosecutor, if the owed alimony is payed still during investigation, or accused is absolved of the prosecution by court if the owed alimony is paid during trial.
But there’re lots of other parents who don’t pay alimony even during a criminal proceeding and are sencenced and punished by the court. Some parents are even repeatedly sent to prison.
A specific feature of this crime is that nearly everyone pleads guilty, but some of them defend and tell, that they didn’t have enough money to pay alimony. This defence is usually rebuted during investigation, only in a few cases is true, so it isn’t possible to convict such person.
In this contribution I’m not going to mention any case of a person, who doesn’t carry out his obligation to provide maintenance, because all the cases are quite similar. Maybe later I’ll mention some interesting or unusual case, if happen.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 8th, 2004 at 8:50 pm and is filed under Criminal law. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.