A comparative analysis of “mens rea” of the assault on civil servants

The social danger of the assault against public officials consists in undermining the authority of the state and obstructing the work of civil servants, a situation that prevents the effective performance of the functions and tasks of the state. No matter how dangerous the Act would be for society, without the element of a spiritual nature that links the author to the “actus reus” of the crime, called the “mens rea”, there is no crime, at the same time, the person cannot be held criminally responsible for the act that does not meet all the signs of the “corpus delicti”, so in the present research are analyzed in comparative aspect the mens rea of assault against a public official. For carrying out the purpose of the research, was revealed the concept of the subject of the crime and its characteristics, the mens rea and its secondary signs. Emphasis was placed on the purpose of the offense of assault, which consists in stopping or changing the character of the service activity of the civil servant. The results of the study will contribute to the development of proposals to amend the current legislation of the Republic of Moldova.