This study examines the administrative and criminal-liability dimensions of unlawful acts committed through negligence in occupational health and safety (OHS) law, focusing on the systems applied under Kazakh, Turkish and English law. The central problem addressed is the divergence in how the international minimum standards shaped by ILO Conventions No 155 and No 187 are transposed into domestic legal systems, and the consequences of these divergences for sanction effectiveness; the study employs positive-law analysis and case-law review as its comparative method. The research classifies criminal policy into three basic categories: the result model (Kazakhstan), the danger model (Türkiye) and the duty model (England). It finds that although the Turkish misdemeanour model theoretically offers a superior preventive capacity, this advantage is diminished by the inadequacy of enforcement mechanisms and by compliance deficits. On the criminal-liability dimension, the protective effect of delegation of authority produced by the principle of personal criminal responsibility, together with the problem of anonymous fault, emerge as the structural obstacle to genuine corporate accountability in large-scale industrial structures. The doctrine of corporate manslaughter introduced by English law through the CMCHA 2007, by treating organisational failure directly as an element of the offence, produces the most systematic normative response to these gaps. The study concludes that it is both a theoretical and a sociological necessity for Turkish and Kazakh law to develop a sui generis corporate criminal liability doctrine inspired by the CMCHA model yet compatible with their own constitutional frameworks, and it further considers the implications of digital technologies for criminal procedure as a forward-looking complementary perspective.
Keywords: Occupational health and safety, negligence, administrative sanctions, criminal liability, corporate criminal liability, conscious negligence, corporate manslaughter, Kazakh law, Turkish law, English law.
İş Sağlığı ve Güvenliği Hukukunda İhmal Suçları ve İdari Yaptırımların Karşılaştırmalı Analizi: İngiltere, Kazakistan ve Türkiye Örnekleri
Dipnot: Bu çalışma, Kazakistan, Türkiye ve İngiltere hukuk sistemlerinde uygulanan sistemlere odaklanarak, iş sağlığı ve güvenliği (İSG) hukukunda ihmal sonucu işlenen hukuka aykırı fiillerin idari ve cezai sorumluluk boyutlarını incelemektedir. Ele alınan temel sorun, ILO 155 ve 187 sayılı Sözleşmeleri ile şekillendirilen uluslararası asgari standartların ulusal hukuk sistemlerine nasıl aktarıldığı ve bu farklılıkların yaptırım etkinliği üzerindeki sonuçlarıdır; çalışma, karşılaştırma yöntemi olarak pozitif hukuk analizi ve içtihat incelemesini kullanmaktadır. Araştırma, ceza politikasını üç temel kategoriye ayırmaktadır: sonuç modeli (Kazakistan), tehlike modeli (Türkiye) ve görev modeli (İngiltere). Çalışma, Türk kabahat modelinin teorik olarak üstün bir önleyici kapasite sunmasına rağmen, bu avantajın uygulama mekanizmalarının yetersizliği ve uyum eksiklikleri nedeniyle azaldığını ortaya koymaktadır. Ceza sorumluluğu boyutunda, kişisel ceza sorumluluğu ilkesinin yarattığı yetki devrinin koruyucu etkisi, anonim kusur sorunuyla birlikte, büyük ölçekli endüstriyel yapılarda gerçek kurumsal hesap verebilirliğin önündeki yapısal engel olarak ortaya çıkmaktadır. İngiliz hukukunun 2007 tarihli CMCHA ile getirdiği kurumsal adam öldürme doktrini, örgütsel başarısızlığı doğrudan suçun bir unsuru olarak ele alarak, bu boşluklara en sistematik normatif yanıtı vermektedir. Çalışma, Türk ve Kazak hukukunun, CMCHA modelinden ilham alan ancak kendi anayasal çerçeveleriyle uyumlu, kendine özgü bir kurumsal ceza sorumluluğu doktrini geliştirmesinin hem teorik hem de sosyolojik bir gereklilik olduğu sonucuna varmakta ve ileriye dönük tamamlayıcı bir bakış açısı olarak dijital teknolojilerin ceza usulüne etkilerini ele almaktadır.
Anahtar Kelimeler: İş sağlığı ve güvenliği, ihmal, idari yaptırımlar, ceza sorumluluğu, kurumsal ceza sorumluluğu, bilinçli ihmal, kurumsal adam öldürme, Kazak hukuku, Türk hukuku, İngiliz hukuku.
Introduction
The right to safe work, shaped within the framework of ILO Conventions No 155[1] and No 187[2], has attained constitutional or statutory protection in both the Continental European and Common Law traditions; nevertheless, deep-rooted differences persist among legal systems as to the normative content of the relevant obligations, the type of liability attached to their breach, and the addressee of the sanction. These differences are not merely a matter of technical classification; they also stand out as structural variables determining the actual level of workplace safety.
According to ILO estimates, more than two million workers lose their lives worldwide each year owing to occupational accidents and diseases[3]; in Türkiye, the Assembly for Workers’ Health and Occupational Safety (İSİG Meclisi) recorded at least 2,105 fatal occupational accidents in 2025[4], while HSE data for England for the same period placed the number of fatalities at 124[5]. This gulf cannot be explained by economic differences alone; the deterrent capacity of the sanctions regime, the intensity of supervision, and whether an occupational accident is legally positioned as a ‘preventable risk’ constitute the principal legal determinants.
Negligence in the field of OHS is converted into either a misdemeanour or a negligent offence depending on the gravity of the outcome, and the criterion for this distinction diverges among systems. Whereas the Turkish danger-misdemeanour model under Article 26 of Law No 6331 (İSGK) treats a breach as grounds for sanction without requiring a condition of harm, the Kazakh result model confines the same act to a lenient sanction until harm actually occurs; the SFAIRP standard[6] under section 2 of the HSWA 1974[7] in English law, by shifting the burden of proof onto the employer, constructs the duty model in the most systematic manner in terms of administrative deterrent capacity[8].
On the criminal dimension of negligence, the principle of personality of criminal responsibility in Turkish law exempts legal persons from being perpetrators of a negligent offence; this gap manifests most acutely in the phenomena of the ‘protective effect of delegation of authority’ and ‘anonymous fault’. The CMCHA 2007[9], by contrast, treats organisational failure directly as an element of the offence, thereby constructing a model of corporate accountability that remains inadequate under Continental European law.
I. Scope and methodology of the research
This study addresses the assessment, in terms of administrative and criminal liability, of unlawful acts committed through negligence in the field of occupational health and safety, and brings within its comparative scope three legal systems that diverge structurally in normative grounding. The decisive reason for this selection is the structural divergence these systems display, in particular, on the question of the criminal liability of legal persons. While Turkish and Kazakh law preserve the principle of personality within a narrow mould, English law, through the CMCHA 2007, has defined organisational failure as an independent element of the offence and established a mechanism of corporate accountability; the difference between these two approaches forms the principal axis of the comparative analysis.
This study is structured around: the normative criteria that determine the legal content of negligence and the threshold at which it converts into a misdemeanour or an offence; the structural analysis of state supervision and the function of the sanctions hierarchy as a «barrier prior to the ultima ratio», together with its deterrent capacity; the criminal-liability dimension of breaches resulting in serious bodily harm or death, together with the determination of the principal employer–subcontractor liability chain; and finally, the assessment, within the framework of fundamental principles, of the systemic defects crystallised in the protective effect of delegation of authority, anonymous fault, and paper compliance, together with the solutions that English law seeks to produce for these defects through the CMCHA 2007 and the SFAIRP standard; the points at which digital technologies intersect with criminal procedure have been excluded from the scope, as a forward-looking extension of gaps that existing law has not resolved. As a comparative model, the research applies, in an integrated manner, literal, historical and purposive interpretation methods together with a comparison method grounded in the practical function rather than the formal structure of norms; it further employs case-law analysis examining, on a file basis, the decisions of the 12th Criminal Chamber of the Court of Cassation on conscious negligence and causation in Turkish law, and corporate manslaughter cases in English law; given the comparatively limited access to Kazakh law, legislative texts and secondary academic literature have served as the primary source for the assessment of Kazakh law.
On the empirical ground of the study, the annual reports of the İSİG Meclisi for Türkiye, the annual bulletins of the HSE for England, and ILO statistical data have principally been relied upon; these statistics have been used to relate the deterrent capacity of the sanctions regimes to the normative analysis.
II. Conceptual and normative framework: the concept of neglicence in OHS law
Theoretical Grounding and the Legal Content of Negligence
The theory of the risk society (Risikogesellschaft), by defining industrial hazards not as nature’s blind violence but as the calculable by-products of rational decision-making processes[10], shifts the occupational accident from the perception of an «unfortunate coincidence» to that of «the foreseeable consequence of the production of a preventable risk». This theoretical infrastructure lends conceptual legitimacy to the transition from a punitive sanctions model to the proactive approach embodied in ILO Conventions No 155 and No 187. At the level of positive law, this transformation has, over time, evolved the employer’s duty of care from a static obligation into a dynamic corporate organisational duty encompassing risk analysis, prevention at source, and continuous supervision. Consequently, negligence — manifested through the disregard of structural risk mechanisms and organisational duties — normatively removes the inevitability of the accident’s outcome, placing this culpable conduct directly at the focus both of systemic administrative sanctions and, in the context of negligent offences, of criminal-liability regimes grounded in negligence or dolus eventualis.
In criminal law doctrine, omissions are divided into genuine and apparent (spurious) omissive offences, and both may be committed with either intent or negligence[11]. The constitutive elements of apparent omissive offences — the guarantor position, preventability of the result, expectability, and objective imputability[12] — correspond normatively to the employer’s duties under Law No 6331. Where the employer’s neglect of the duties of risk prevention, control and continuous improvement combines with a result of death or injury, liability under Articles 85 and 89 of the Turkish Criminal Code (TCK)[13] is triggered. However, because Turkish criminal legislation contains no general provision on apparent omissive offences and confines omissive liability to intentional offence types such as intentional homicide (TCK art 83) and intentional injury (TCK art 88), a dogmatic impasse arises in negligent occupational-accident cases. This structural situation renders the distinction between conscious negligence and dolus eventualis/negligent-omissive intentional homicide the most critical threshold in adjudication[14]; the inaction of an employer who foresaw the risk yet failed to take preventive measures is, in judicial practice, predominantly punished as conscious negligence[15]. On the other hand, making the causal link and the distribution of fault dependent on technical expert reports[16] creates a «protective effect of delegation of authority» that shields senior employers within complex corporate management structures, and feeds the risk that criminal responsibility, diffused across lower echelons, degenerates into the problem of «anonymous fault». In other words, the scale of culpability is a graduated mental intensity ranging from the failure to foresee the result (ordinary negligence), through baselessly trusting that a foreseen result will not occur (conscious negligence), to accepting the result «come what may» (dolus eventualis), and finally to its direct pursuit (direct intent). Negligence, in turn, is the material form of conduct through which any of these degrees of culpability is manifested to the outside world by the mere failure to act — by inaction — rather than by the performance of the active duty of prevention the law commands. For example, an employer’s failure to install a safety net at a construction site where work at height is performed constitutes negligence as a form of conduct; whereas the failure to foresee, or the baseless trust that it would not occur, that a worker would fall and be injured or killed as a result of this inaction is characterised, as the mental element, within the concept of negligence (taksir).
Kazakh Administrative Offences Code and Criminal Code adopt this definition and regulate negligence in two sub-forms: in the form of «self-confidence» (samonadeyannost’), the perpetrator has foreseen that a dangerous result might occur but has believed, on the basis of a baseless trust in his or her own competence or in external circumstances, that it could be prevented; in the form of «carelessness» (nebrezhnost’), the perpetrator has not foreseen the result at all, although, given the perpetrator’s duty and professional training, foreseeing it was both possible and required[17].
This binary distinction corresponds structurally to the opposition between conscious and unconscious negligence set out in Article 22 of Law No 5237 (TCK). In conscious negligence, the perpetrator foresaw the result but acted in the belief that it would not occur (TCK art 22/3), whereas in unconscious negligence, although the result was foreseeable, it was not foreseen at all, and the duty of care and attention was wholly neglected (TCK art 22/2).
Accordingly, negligent offences come into being through the normative combination of the material element — the inaction of the perpetrator (guarantor) who is legally obliged to prevent the typical result — with the mental element of intent or negligence accompanying that inaction. The dogmatic impasse referred to above arises because the legislature has confined apparent omissive liability solely to intentional offence types (TCK arts 83, 88), thereby forcing negligent occupational-accident cases — which are, in essence, omissive offences — necessarily to be adjudicated under the commissive offence patterns (TCK arts 85, 89). Lacking a general dogmatic control mechanism capable of establishing the equivalence of omissive conduct to commission, this legal design forces practice to subsume every proactive inaction in occupational-safety organisation directly into commissive fault or conscious negligence, without any theoretical test.
Normative Framework and the Concrete Manifestations of Negligent Breaches
Negligent breaches are concentrated more heavily in heavy industry, construction, mining, oil-gas and energy sectors, where the intensity of mechanical, chemical and physical hazards is highest. According to İSİG Meclisi data for Türkiye, a substantial proportion of occupational fatalities occur in the construction and mining sectors, while HSE data for England reveal the same sectoral pattern manifesting at a far lower accident rate[18]; this picture reinforces the hypothesis that, although sectoral hazard structures are similar, the deterrent capacity of sanction mechanisms diverges decisively.
In the field of OHS, negligent breaches most commonly and most extensively take the documented form of failure to supply personal protective equipment (PPE), non-compliance with safety technique, and violation of procedures in hazardous areas. Under Turkish law, the Regulation on Personal Protective Equipment[19] places on the employer the obligations of supplying the equipment, keeping it usable, and informing employees, while under Kazakh law the Labour Code No 414-V[20] places similar obligations among the employer’s principal responsibilities; breach of these obligations gives rise, under Turkish law, to an administrative fine under Article 26 of Law No 6331 (İSGK) and, depending on the gravity of the harm, to individual criminal liability under Articles 85 or 89 of the TCK, while under Kazakh law it gives rise to either administrative sanction or criminal prosecution depending on the gravity of the result[21].
The continued use of production equipment that has not been periodically inspected, or that is obsolete, constitutes the second principal form of breach, creating a permanent and unforeseeable source of hazard. Under Turkish law, Article 10 of Law No 6331 (İSGK) imposes on the employer the obligation to identify hazards, conduct a risk assessment, and renew it where circumstances change; breach of this obligation is subject to administrative sanction without any requirement of harm. Under Kazakh law, technical-inspection obligations rest on similarly mandatory standards, but sanctioning a breach arising from a lack of inspection largely requires that a harmful result has already occurred, which corresponds to the result model rather than the danger model.
Failure to fulfil the training obligation is not merely an organisational shortcoming; it is a concrete form of negligence that prevents the employee from correctly perceiving risks, responding appropriately upon noticing a hazard, and timely reporting hazardous conditions. Under Turkish law, Article 17 of Law No 6331 (İSGK) makes training mandatory before commencing work, upon a change of job, and upon any change in working conditions, with its content and periodicity elaborated in the OHS Training Regulation. Under Kazakh law, the Labour Code No 414-V imposes a similar information obligation on the employer, and in both systems breach of the obligation is treated as subject to administrative sanction without any requirement of harm[22].
The phenomenon of «paper compliance»[23] — where safety obligations appear to be satisfied only at the documentary level while an effective safety management system is not actually operated — constitutes one of the most complex and structural forms of breach, chronically documented as an organisational problem in both Turkish and Kazakh practice[24]. English law, by contrast, produces a systemic legal response to this problem through the improvement notice and prohibition notice under sections 21–22 of the HSWA 1974, which empower the inspector to assess the actual effectiveness of measures rather than merely the existence of documents; the Fee for Intervention (FFI) mechanism further reinforces the institutional deterrent effect of the supervisory process[25].
From a normative classification perspective, Kazakh law predominantly adopts the result model: where the same breach has not caused harm, it falls within the scope of administrative sanction, and where it has resulted in serious bodily harm or death, it falls within the scope of criminal prosecution. This structure crystallises in the graduated sanctions chain formed by Article 24 of the Constitution of Kazakhstan[26], the Labour Code No 414-V, the Administrative Offences Code[27] and the Criminal Code[28]; however, meeting a dangerous breach that has not yet caused harm with a relatively lenient administrative sanction produces a deterrence profile that falls short of halting systematic breach conduct at an early stage.
Turkish law, through Article 26 of Law No 6331 (İSGK), places the danger-misdemeanour at the centre of administrative liability and dispenses with any requirement of harm, triggering an administrative fine independently of the outcome of the breach. Legal persons are made the direct addressees of the administrative fine under Article 8 of the Misdemeanours Law No 5326[29]; this mechanism functionally overcomes, at the level of administrative liability, the obstacle that the principle of personality poses for legal persons[30]. Nevertheless, it is assessed that the relative inadequacy of penalty amounts against the wealth of large corporations, the incapacity of inspector numbers to meet supervisory demand, and the systematic exclusion of unregistered workplaces from supervision may leave the actual deterrent value of the danger model behind its theoretical potential.
The SFAIRP standard adopted by English law under section 2 of the HSWA 1974 does not tie the obligation to an absolute threshold of technical superiority but instead constructs a proportionality test between the magnitude of the hazard and the cost of the safety measure, expecting the employer to prove that every reasonable measure was taken. The reversed burden of proof[31] — criticised by Continental European jurists as being in tension with the presumption of innocence — is accepted by English courts as a proportionate instrument; this approach structurally narrows the practical validity of the paper-compliance defence.
The CMCHA 2007 in English law has removed the requirement of identifying a «guilty directing mind» in order to convict a company; under it, where the way in which a company organises its activities amounts to a gross breach of the duty of care and causes the death of a worker, the company can be tried directly for the offence of «corporate manslaughter»[32]. R v Cotswold Geotechnical Holdings Ltd is the first precedent applying this new system and resulting in conviction[33]. In calculating fines to be imposed on companies, the Sentencing Council guidelines directly link the amount of the fine to the company’s annual turnover, thereby making the severity of the penalty proportionate to, and a genuine deterrent relative to, the company’s economic scale[34].
While ILO standards and the EU’s Directive 89/391/EEC[35] require OHS sanctions to be «effective, proportionate and dissuasive», they consistently position criminal law as a measure of «last resort» (ultima ratio). Indeed, the Sentencing Council’s 2019 assessment report indicates that corporate discipline is largely sought to be achieved through high-value fines targeting the rational decision-making mechanisms of legal persons; yet the same report also explicitly states that it does not empirically confirm the deterrent effect of this approach[36]. This international approach theoretically supports the requirement that, rather than resorting after the fact to the mechanism of negligent homicide/injury (TCK arts 85/89) following an occupational accident, administrative fines at the pre-accident stage should be structured, in line with the economic-analysis-of-crime theories, at a level capable of affecting the economic rationality of legal persons.
The three legal systems examined reflect three basic models in terms of the classification of breaches, sanction mechanisms, and the nature of the criminal policy adopted. Kazakhstan’s criminal-policy practice can be placed within the «result model» mould, which directly ties the severity of the sanction to the scale of the harm; this can function to hinder intervention against dangerous breaches carrying the potential for harm before the harm has actually materialised. Türkiye’s approach, by contrast, can be characterised as grounded in the «danger model», which treats the breach itself as sufficient for sanction; yet, once again, deficiencies in supervisory capacity and the limited deterrent dimension of penalties emerge as factors constraining the model’s actual field effectiveness. In the case of England, policy practice can be said to run parallel to the principles of the «duty model». Indeed, the reversal of the burden of proof and the CMCHA’s positioning of organisational failure directly as an element of the offence reflect an approach aimed at structurally eliminating both paper-compliance problems and the concealment of the legal person behind an individual perpetrator.
III. State supervision, administrative liability and the sabtions regime (barrier prior to the ultima ratio)
Supervisory Bodies and the Structural Analysis of the Preventive Function
The transformation of the normative existence of the administrative sanctions regime on paper into an actual deterrent value depends on the genuine functioning of supervisory mechanisms; where legal intervention does not occur in a timely, comprehensive and foreseeable manner, even a very well-designed sanctions system can be reduced to a purely symbolic function. In the criminology and law-and-economics literature, deterrence is assessed along the dimensions of «specific deterrence» — preventing the same offender from reoffending — and «general deterrence» — shaping the general compliance behaviour of all potential offenders; the realisation of both functions is directly dependent on parameters such as the numerical adequacy of supervisory bodies, the breadth of their scope, the consistency of sanctions, and public transparency.
In Kazakhstan, occupational-safety supervision is jointly conducted by the labour inspectorate, emergency-situation bodies, and sanitary-epidemiological services; these institutions have the authority to conduct both pre-programmed and unplanned inspections based on complaints or accident notifications. In the Russian Federation, the same function is carried out within Rostrud, structured at the federal level[37]; in both systems, upon detection of a breach, the sanction is determined by jointly assessing the gravity of the unlawfulness, the scale of the harm, and the degree of the perpetrator’s fault. The common structural weakness of the Kazakh and Russian models is that supervisory capacity lacks systematic prioritisation by high-risk sector, and that transparency mechanisms requiring the public disclosure of sanction decisions have not yet been institutionally embedded.
In Türkiye, supervisory authority belongs to the labour inspectors within the Ministry of Labour and Social Security; inspectors conduct planned inspections at workplaces prioritised according to risk level, and may also resort to unplanned inspections following complaints or occupational accidents. Three structural difficulties jointly limit the actual functioning of the Turkish supervisory system: the disproportion between the number of inspectors and the number of workplaces requiring supervision; the fact that unregistered workplaces remain effectively outside the reach of the sanctions mechanism; and the relatively low level of fine amounts when compared with the economic capacity of large enterprises. Together, these three factors erode the practical significance of the danger-misdemeanour model.
In England, the HSE applies a proactive, risk-based supervisory strategy in which high-risk sectors are systematically prioritised; the improvement notice[38] and the prohibition notice[39] operate within a graduated hierarchy. The Fee for Intervention (FFI) mechanism under the Health and Safety (Fees) Regulations 2012 makes the system self-financing by directly recovering supervisory costs from breaching enterprises; the public disclosure of finalised sanction decisions and notices adds institutional reputational risk to the fine as an additional sanction element, amplifying general-deterrent capacity through a multiplier effect[40].
Comparing the supervisory models of the three systems shows that actual supervisory effectiveness depends, beyond legal authority and organisational structure, on the ratio of inspector capacity to the universe of workplaces, on whether the scope of coverage includes the unregistered sector, on the consistency of sanctions, and on whether the principle of transparency is institutionally applied. Despite the similarity of sectoral hazard profiles, the gulf between the İSİG Meclisi’s[41] figure of 2,105 Turkish fatalities and the HSE’s[42] figure of 124 English fatalities is the most striking indicator of the effect of these variables on the sanctions norm.
The Legal Nature of Administrative Liability
Administrative liability is a composite legal-effect mechanism applied by competent authorities to persons who breach public order, simultaneously undertaking sanctioning and preventive functions; because it falls within the «misdemeanour» or «administrative breach» category rather than the «offence» category, the attribution of liability can be carried out through a simpler procedure without the evidentiary threshold and procedural guarantees of criminal proceedings. In OHS law, the true test of this mechanism is whether it can eliminate the hazard before harm occurs. An administrative system that merely applies sanctions is not a «barrier prior to the ultima ratio» but is reduced to a mere loss-registration mechanism; whether the barrier function is actually realised is determined by the model the system adopts.
Under the result model adopted by Kazakh law, the nature and severity of the sanction is graduated according to the type and scale of the harm; where the same breach conduct has not caused harm, it is met with a relatively lenient administrative sanction, while where it has resulted in serious bodily harm or death, it becomes subject to criminal prosecution. Although this graduated structure of the Kazakh Administrative Offences Code (No 235-V, 2014) provides legal foreseeability, because it positions the materialisation of harm as the trigger that activates the liability chain, it systematically limits the capacity to prevent hazard at an early stage; halting systematic breach conduct before harm occurs becomes correspondingly difficult[43].
Turkish law, through Article 26 of Law No 6331 (İSGK), has made the danger-misdemeanour the axis of administrative liability and dispensed with the requirement of harm; breaches such as the failure to conduct a risk assessment, failure to supply PPE, failure to provide training, and failure to prepare an emergency action plan trigger an administrative fine without the occurrence of actual injury or death. The fact that legal persons are made the direct addressees of the administrative fine under Article 8 of the Misdemeanours Law No 5326 functionally closes, at the level of administrative liability, the gap created by the principle of personality in criminal law; by accepting the legal person’s economic operating capacity as the basis for sanction, this solution under misdemeanour law establishes a ground for corporate deterrence.
The SFAIRP standard constructed by English law under section 2 of the HSWA 1974 gives effect to the «duty model» by establishing a proportionality test between the magnitude of the hazard and the cost of the safety measure, rather than tying the obligation to an absolute threshold of technical superiority, and reverses the burden of proof, expecting the employer to prove that every reasonable measure was taken[44]. This mechanism structurally disables the paper-compliance defence, compels the inspector to interrogate the actual effectiveness of measures beyond mere documentation, and — although regarded by Continental European jurists as being in tension with the presumption of innocence — is found by English courts to be compatible with ECtHR case law.
Sanctions Hierarchy, Deterrent Capacity, and the Bridge to Criminal Law
In the legal systems examined, administrative sanctions are applied within a hierarchy graduated according to the gravity of the breach. The warning, forming the base, performs a purely notificatory reminder function, while the principal financial instrument — fines — is indexed, in Kazakhstan, to the Monthly Calculation Index (MCI)[45]; in Türkiye, to fixed amounts indexed by type of obligation; and in England, to annual turnover pursuant to Sentencing Council guidelines[46]. Where a hazard arises for employees, the prohibition-notice power is exercised by the authorities in Turkish and Kazakh law, and by the HSE in English law. Turkish OHS policy has adopted a proactive sanctioning model to preserve the authority of this administrative prohibition decision; under Article 25/8 of Law No 6331, it provides for imprisonment of three to five years for employers who allow work to continue at a workplace that has been shut down without permission, thereby reinforcing the administrative measure with a criminal-law norm[47].
The most chronic structural problem of administrative sanctions systems is that the relative severity of fine amounts is inadequate against the economic capacity of large-scale enterprises, and that this creates a rational basis for «calculated risk-taking» behaviour. As formulated in the classical model of the economics of crime, where the expected value of the sanction — the product of probability and the amount of the penalty — falls below the threshold of benefit derived from the breach, the sanction ceases to function as a safety incentive and instead becomes a cost item that prices the preventable accident risk[48]. In Kazakhstan and Türkiye, fine amounts that are fixed or only limitedly graduated by enterprise size represent a structural weakness that, in practice, supports the rationality of calculated risk-taking. In other words, despite the protective reflex of criminal-law dogmatics, which does not require actual harm to have occurred, danger models within the OHS regime are devalued behind the ultima ratio barrier. The preference for continuity of production over the prevention of hazard implicitly supports the production of risk, while the persistent classification of even recurrent serious breaches within the misdemeanour category, rather than as an independent category of «danger offences», turns sanctions policy into a reactive compensation refuge.
English law responds to this problem principally through two mechanisms: the FFI under the Health and Safety (Fees) Regulations 2012, which directly recovers supervisory costs from breaching enterprises, creating an additional financial burden independent of the fine amount and rendering the system self-financing; and, in corporate manslaughter cases under the CMCHA 2007, the Sentencing Council guidelines, which impose on the court an obligation to proportion the legal person’s fine to the company’s annual turnover, preventing large enterprises from escaping accountability through symbolic penalties[49]. This proportional-deterrence approach represents a structural advance that Kazakh and Turkish law have not yet implemented.
The comparative assessment reveals that the actual effectiveness of an administrative sanctions regime depends not merely on the type and nominal amount of the sanction prescribed, but on the ratio of inspector capacity to the universe of workplaces, on the proportionality of the fine to the scale of the enterprise, on whether unregistered work disables the system, and on whether decisions are disclosed to the public. A normative assessment made without regard to these variables risks falling into the fallacy of equating the mere existence of legislation with sanction effectiveness; it also conceals the structural explanation for why, despite Kazakhstan’s and Türkiye’s efforts to approach the danger model, they fall behind the deterrent performance of the English system.
Where the administrative sanctions regime genuinely fulfils its function as a «barrier prior to the ultima ratio», the intervention of criminal law theoretically remains a matter of last resort; however, where the administrative mechanism is obstructed — where supervisory capacity is inadequate, where fines fail to prevent calculated risk-taking, and where paper compliance substitutes for actual safety — serious bodily harm or death becomes inevitable, and the intervention of criminal law assumes a necessary function.
The principle of personality of criminal responsibility, as it applies in Turkish criminal law, precludes the punishment of legal persons; this state of affairs prepares a structural ground for artificial-delegation-of-authority practices, whereby senior management transfers criminal responsibility to lower echelons, for the phenomenon of «anonymous fault» in which systemic organisational errors are concealed, and for the impasse of «paper compliance», in which safety remains at the documentary level alone[50]. English Anglo-Saxon law, by contrast, reverses the burden of proof under the HSWA 1974 and the SFAIRP standard, compelling the employer to prove actual safety in the field rather than formal documentation[51]; and through the CMCHA 2007, by removing the requirement of identifying a «directing mind», it can directly punish serious corporate organisational failures as an independent offence of «corporate manslaughter».
IV. Negeligent OHS offences and the criminal liability regime in comparative law
In all three legal systems examined, the transposition of occupational-safety breaches onto the criminal plane is largely tied to the gravity of the resulting harm — serious bodily harm or death; however, the manner of reaching this common threshold, and the question of who is to be tried as the perpetrator, diverge among the systems. Kazakh law opens the criminal route through the result model; Turkish law focuses on the form of culpability of the individual perpetrator; English law, by opening independent routes to both individual negligence (gross negligence manslaughter) and corporate organisational failure (corporate manslaughter), presents the most comprehensive model among the three systems.
The Kazakh Criminal Code directly subjects the persons concerned to criminal sanction where a breach of occupational-safety requirements results in serious harm to an employee’s health or in death; this normative structure incorporates, as the fault basis of criminal liability, the two sub-forms of negligence — «self-confidence» (samonadeyannost’), which trusts that the result can be prevented, and «carelessness» (nebrezhnost’), which fails to foresee the result at all. In this legal system, the fact that the same act can trigger both administrative sanction and criminal prosecution — despite the differing legal interests protected, namely public administrative order and the right to life — constitutes a legal problem requiring separate discussion in the context of the ne bis in idem principle.
In Turkish law, criminal liability arising from an occupational accident is, together with case law, shaped largely around Article 22 of the TCK. In ordinary negligence, the perpetrator continues to act in breach of the duty of care and attention without foreseeing the foreseeable result at all, whereas in conscious negligence, the perpetrator acts while foreseeing the result but trusting that it will not occur; in the case of conscious negligence, the penalty is increased by between one-third and one-half[52].
In English law, R v Adomako [1995] 1 AC 171, which shapes the field of individual criminal liability, requires the jury to assess whether the defendant’s conduct was grossly negligent to a criminal degree, within the triangle of the existence of a duty of care, its serious breach, and the causal link with death; this approach partially overlaps with the conscious-negligence test in Turkish law, while being more flexible and case-specific, given that the threshold of culpability is left to the jury[53]. With the CMCHA 2007 bringing legal persons within the scope of trial through the offence of corporate manslaughter, the English model stands out as a system capable of operating simultaneously through both the individual-negligent-offence route and the corporate-organisational-failure route, directly regulating a field of corporate criminal accountability that the principle of personality renders unavailable in Turkish law[54].
V. Discussion
The deep asymmetry between the normative richness of occupational health and safety (OHS) law and the occupational-fatality rates observed in the field — at least 2,105 worker deaths recorded in Türkiye in 2025, against 124 in England for the same period — places at the centre of the study the question of whether the existence of legislation automatically secures the effectiveness of sanctions regimes. The empirical data yielded by the comparative analysis answer this question in the negative, confirming that actual effectiveness is shaped less by the literal content of normative texts than by the structural design of administrative liability models. In this context, examination of administrative liability regimes reveals three basic models: Kazakhstan’s «result model», which graduates the severity of the sanction not according to the breach itself but according to the ultimate harm it causes, and which allows dangerous acts to be dealt with through lenient sanctions so long as they cause no harm; the Turkish «danger model», which treats the breach of a rule, independently of harm, as grounds for sanction in itself, thereby offering proactive protection and directly bringing legal persons within the scope of misdemeanour liability; and finally, the «duty model» of English law, which establishes a continuous proportionality test between the scale of the hazard and the cost of the measure, imposing a proactive management burden on the employer.
However, the theoretical superiority of these administrative models does not, without regard to the actual functioning and capacity of supervisory mechanisms, produce practical deterrence. In Türkiye, the deep disproportion in the number of workplaces per inspector and the structural dynamics of unregistered employment erode the normative force of the danger model in the field; while the UK Health and Safety Executive’s (HSE) proactive inspection strategy, which prioritises high-risk sectors, its powers to issue prohibition notices, and transparency instruments such as the Fee for Intervention (FFI) mechanism — which brings reputational risk into the process — create a concrete effectiveness gap. Indeed, the phenomenon of «paper compliance» — observed as a chronic organisational pathology in all three systems, whereby safety is met only at the documentary level and is not actually operated in the field — is the greatest testing ground for the models. English law, through the SFAIRP standard it has developed, structurally disables this bureaucratic shield by obliging inspectors to interrogate the actual field effectiveness of measures rather than the existence of printed documents; the absence of any such mechanism in the Kazakh regime, and the reduction, in Turkish practice, of the theoretical force of the danger model to superficial paper review — turning it into a systematic weakness — are assessed in the literature as a deep-rooted deficiency.
When one turns to the dimension of criminal liability, the dogmatic divergence among the legal systems takes on a more radical appearance. Whereas in Kazakh law the threshold for criminal prosecution is invariably tied to the occurrence of serious bodily harm or death, in Turkish criminal law the process is conducted largely through the negligence provisions of the Turkish Criminal Code, yet the principle of personality of criminal responsibility prevents legal persons from being direct perpetrators, creating a systematic point of blockage[55]. These constitutional limits prepare the ground for two basic structural gaps in which the real perpetrators are concealed behind the corporate hierarchy: «abuse of delegation of authority» and «anonymous fault». Despite the Court of Cassation’s consistent case law holding that documentary delegation does not remove liability unless actual authority and budget are also transferred, company managers’ efforts to escape responsibility by transferring OHS obligations to lower echelons through written documents can, in practice, leave senior management unpunished, because expert examinations remain at a purely technical level. Similarly, in multi-layered organisational errors, the fact that no single actor’s fault appears, on its own, sufficiently intense to have caused the result feeds a chronic injustice referred to in the doctrine as the «de-personalisation of the offence», under which collective institutional failures go unpunished[56].
Against these institutional shields, the most functional barrier developed in Turkish judicial practice is the conscious-negligence interpretive strategy shaped by the consistent decisions of the 12th Criminal Chamber of the Court of Cassation. The Court of Cassation assesses, as conscious negligence, the liability of employers who, despite the clearly foreseeable risk of a fall from height, fail to take the necessary collective protective measures[57], and, in determining culpability, ties the decisive criterion to «not whether the result was actually foreseen, but whether it was consciously disregarded although it ought to have been foreseen», thereby making the increase of penalties under TCK art 22/3 mandatory[58]. Under this dogmatic approach of the Court of Cassation, in determining an employer’s criminal liability, cumulative fault criteria include: the failure, amounting to a degree of negligence bordering on intent, to take technical safety measures in high-risk working environments; the merely formal fulfilment of the obligations of continuous employee training (eg E 2020/4203) and effective field supervision; and the disregard of measures, despite awareness of known risks, for the sake of profit or time optimisation.
To this crisis of corporate accountability — which Turkish and Kazakh law have not overcome owing to their individualist theory of the perpetrator — Anglo-Saxon law has produced a radical and systemic response through the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007 (CMCHA). Abandoning the constraints of the classical «identification doctrine», which required identifying a senior «directing mind», this model punishes, as an independent offence of corporate manslaughter, the holistic «organisational failure» in the manner in which the legal person organises and directs its activities. The historic conviction in R v Cotswold Geotechnical Holdings Ltd, handed down following the systematic disregard of sector standards and official warnings, demonstrates the judicial force of this approach, while the Sentencing Council guidelines’ proportioning of fines to the company’s annual turnover synchronises deterrence with corporate scale. Given that modern industrial hazards are no longer nature’s inevitable blind violence but the foreseeable structural by-product of corporate risk management and rational decision-making processes[59], this systemic approach — which refuses to view occupational accidents as «unfortunate coincidences» — imposes, as a sociological necessity, the development, by both Continental European countries, of a sui generis corporate criminal model compatible with their own constitutional limits[60].
In the final analysis, the comparative findings show that the effectiveness of OHS sanctions is directly related not merely to where the administrative–criminal boundary is drawn, but to whether breaches are placed on a systematic scale of fault extending across the broad spectrum from misdemeanour to intent. In determining whether an act constitutes an administrative misdemeanour, a negligent offence, or a criminal wrong ranging from conscious negligence to dolus eventualis, grounding the assessment on the criterion of whether the limit of «permitted risk»[61] in criminal law has been exceeded, and on the mental intensity of the perpetrator, will lend theoretical depth to judicial foreseeability and the principle of proportionality. In addition to this quest for general criminal-law reform, reform efforts aimed at monitoring preventive practices, governance capacity, and the economic value of OHS through leading indicators[62], combined with the speed that industrial digitalisation brings to procedural law and with new evidentiary theories, necessarily require the construction of a contemporary digital criminal-procedure framework for proving negligent OHS offences. However, the additional complexities that this model — distinguished by its flexible character and its sensitivity to mental intensity — may generate for procedural economy and the balance of the burden of proof remain an open problem requiring further interdisciplinary academic research.
Conclusion
This study has sought to analyse, from a comparative and dogmatic perspective, the administrative and criminal-liability dimensions of unlawful acts committed through negligence in the field of occupational health and safety, across the legal systems of Kazakhstan, Türkiye and England. The research findings reveal that, while the common normative purpose of all three legal systems is to protect the life and health of employees, the deep-rooted differences among the legal instruments developed to achieve this purpose produce decisive consequences for sanction effectiveness.
The fact that, in Kazakh law, the boundary between administrative and criminal liability is drawn largely according to outcome — so that the same breach is subject to administrative sanction where it causes no harm, and to criminal prosecution where it results in serious harm or death — offers a consistent graduation, but creates a significant structural limitation on the capacity to timely detect and prevent hazard. The Turkish danger-misdemeanour model offers a normative framework aimed at overcoming this limitation; however, the inadequacy of supervisory capacity and the gaps created by unregistered employment constrain the model’s actual deterrent value.
One of the study’s most salient findings is that the structural gap created by the principle of «personality of criminal responsibility» in Turkish criminal law — which exempts legal persons from direct criminal liability — is increasingly and acutely felt in practice through the protective effect of delegation of authority and the problem of anonymous fault. In scenarios in which organisational errors in large-scale industrial establishments cannot be adequately attributed to any individual actor, the search for an individual perpetrator produces results incompatible with a sense of justice, leaving the capital structures that are the true decision-makers outside accountability. In this context, the English doctrine of corporate manslaughter — by treating organisational failure directly as an element of the offence — offers a profound normative model that warrants consideration by both Turkish and Kazakh law.
Another determinative point highlighted by the comparative analysis is the divergence in the functioning of supervisory models. England’s proactive, risk-based supervisory approach strengthens corporate deterrence in a multi-layered manner through the practice of publicly disclosing sanction notices and through the Fee for Intervention mechanism. By contrast, the limited supervisory capacity in Kazakhstan and Türkiye, and the fact that transparency mechanisms have not yet been institutionally implemented, make it more difficult to close the gap between normative guarantees and actual practice. The principal causes of breach identified in the research — non-compliance with safety technique, inadequate employee training, weak technical inspection, and employers’ organisational irresponsibility — should be assessed as concrete reflections of this supervisory gap.
The implications of digital transformation for occupational-safety law and criminal procedure represent a new paradigm shift for which the systems examined have not yet produced an adequate normative response. The spread of algorithmic decision-making processes, the effects of predictive artificial-intelligence systems on the law of evidence, and the increasingly uncertain boundaries of corporate criminal liability have been addressed in the study from a forward-looking perspective, and the urgent need for normative development in these areas has been emphasised.
In conclusion, this study demonstrates that the prevention of occupational health and safety breaches cannot be secured automatically by the mere existence of legal regulation; the effectiveness of administrative and criminal liability mechanisms depends on the realistic scale of supervisory capacity, on the proportionality of the sanction to institutional scale, and on the compatibility of legislation with changing production technologies. For Kazakh law, England’s risk-based management experience and the Turkish danger-misdemeanour model may be regarded as concrete reform perspectives; for Turkish law, the need for a profound transformation in the field of corporate criminal liability retains its place on the agenda as a historical debt of criminal policy directed towards the protection of human life and health. The genuine prevention of occupational-safety breaches depends on the functional establishment of a tripartite structure of responsibility comprising the state’s effective supervisory function, the employer’s institutional accountability, and the informed participation of the employee.
Information about the authors:
Dr. Cüneyt Şamil Oğurlu,
Criminal Law Expert, Department of Law, Istanbul Chamber of Commerce, Türkiye
ORCID: 0009-0003-3708-755X
Kamshat Baiterekova,
PhD candidate, L.N. Gumilyov Eurasian National University, Faculty of Law,
ORCID: 0009-0003-0753-3651
*The image was generated by the Open AI neural network.
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[2]Promotional Framework for Occupational Safety and Health Convention 2006 (No 187).
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[7]Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974 (HSWA 1974).
[8]Occupational Health and Safety Law 2012 (Law No 6331) [İş Sağlığı ve Güvenliği Kanunu] art 26; HSWA 1974; Administrative Offences Code 2014 (Kazakhstan, No 235-V).
[9]Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007 (CMCHA 2007).
[10]Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (Mark Ritter tr, SAGE Publications 1992) 19–23.
[11]İzzet Özgenç, Türk Ceza Hukuku Genel Hükümler [General Principles of Turkish Criminal Law] (18th edn, Seçkin Yayınları 2022) 229 ff.
[12]Bahri Öztürk and Mustafa Ruhan Erdem, Uygulamalı Ceza Hukuku ve Güvenlik Tedbirleri Hukuku [Applied Criminal Law and the Law of Security Measures] (19th edn, Seçkin Yayıncılık 2019) 443.
[13]Turkish Criminal Code (Law No 5237) [Türk Ceza Kanunu] (TCK).
[14]AD Baygeldi and S Gerdan, ‘İş Sağlığı ve Güvenliği Kapsamında Ölümlü İş Kazalarına Yönelik Yargıtay Kararları’ [Court of Cassation Decisions on Fatal Occupational Accidents in the Context of Occupational Health and Safety] (2019) 3 Resilience 101.
[15]Court of Cassation, 12th Criminal Chamber, E 2020/11833, K 2024/4424; Court of Cassation, 12th Criminal Chamber, E 2020/11242, K 2024/4128.
[16]Mustafa Özen, ‘İş Kazalarında Hukuki, Cezai ve İdari Sorumluluk’ [Civil, Criminal and Administrative Liability in Occupational Accidents] (2015) 2 Ankara Barosu Dergisi 230, 247.
[17]Criminal Code 2014 (Kazakhstan); Administrative Offences Code 2014 (Kazakhstan).
[18]İSİG Meclisi <https://isigmeclisi.org> accessed 1 July 2026; Health and Safety Executive, ‘Fatal Injuries in Great Britain’ <https://www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/fatals.htm> accessed 1 July 2026.
[19]Regulation on Personal Protective Equipment (RG 28695, 2 July 2013) [Kişisel Koruyucu Donanım Yönetmeliği].
[20]Labour Code 2015 (Kazakhstan, No 414-V) ch 22.
[21]Regulation on Personal Protective Equipment (n 21); Occupational Health and Safety Law art 26; Turkish Criminal Code arts 85, 89; Labour Code 2015 (Kazakhstan).
[22]Occupational Health and Safety Law arts 17–26; Regulation on the Procedures and Principles of Occupational Health and Safety Training for Employees (RG 28648, 15 May 2013) [Çalışanların İş Sağlığı ve Güvenliği Eğitimlerinin Usul ve Esasları Hakkında Yönetmelik]; Labour Code 2015 (Kazakhstan).
[23]Richard Johnstone and David Walters, ‘Regulating Systematic Occupational Health and Safety Management: Comparing the Norwegian and Australian Experience’ (2003) 58(1) Relations Industrielles / Industrial Relations 48.
[24]İSİG Meclisi (n 6), ‘2025 Yılı İş Cinayetleri Raporu’ [2025 Annual Report on Occupational Homicides] <https://www.isigmeclisi.org/is-cinayetleri-raporlari> accessed 1 July 2026; Bureau of National Statistics of the Agency for Strategic Planning and Reforms of the Republic of Kazakhstan, On Work-Related Injuries and Occupational Diseases in the Republic of Kazakhstan (2025) (Statistical Bulletin, 25 May 2026) 4–6; see further Ministry of Labor and Social Protection of Kazakhstan, ‘How Can Kazakhstan Reduce Workplace Injuries?’ (Ranking Law and Industry Review, 4 June 2026) <https://ranking.kz/en/reviews-en/industries-en/how-can-kazakhstan-reduce-workplace-injuries.html> accessed 1 July 2026.
[25]HSWA 1974, ss 21–22; Health and Safety (Fees) Regulations 2012, SI 2012/1652.
[26]Konstitutsiä Respüblïkası Qazaqstan 1995 [Constitution of the Republic of Kazakhstan 1995] art 24 <adilet.zan.kz/kaz/docs/K950001000_> accessed 1 July 2026.
[27]Ädilet Quqyq Buzuşylyq Turaly Kodeksi 2014 [Administrative Offences Code 2014] (Republic of Kazakhstan) No 235-V, 5 July 2014 <adilet.zan.kz>.
[28]Qylmystyq Kodeksi 2014 [Criminal Code 2014] (Republic of Kazakhstan) No 226-V, 3 July 2014 <adilet.zan.kz/kaz/docs/K1400000226> accessed 1 July 2026.
[29]Misdemeanours Law 2005 (Law No 5326) [Kabahatler Kanunu].
[30]Misdemeanours Law No 5326, art 8; Sami Narter, İş Sağlığı ve Güvenliği Hukukunda İdari, Cezai ve Hukuki Sorumluluk [Administrative, Criminal and Civil Liability in Occupational Health and Safety Law] (Adalet Yayınevi 2018) 78–85.
[31]HSWA 1974, s 40.
[32]Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007.
[33]R v Cotswold Geotechnical Holdings Ltd [2011] EWCA Crim 1337.
[34]Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007, s 1; R v Cotswold Geotechnical Holdings Ltd [2011] EWCA Crim 1337, paras 32–35; Sentencing Council, Health and Safety Offences, Corporate Manslaughter and Food Safety and Hygiene Offences: Definitive Guideline (Sentencing Council 2015); Gözde Kaçmaz Keskin, ‘Türk ve Amerikan Ceza Hukukunda Tüzel Kişilerin Sorumluluğu’ [The Liability of Legal Persons in Turkish and American Criminal Law] (PhD Thesis, Bahçeşehir University 2023) 140.
[35]Council Directive 89/391/EEC of 12 June 1989 on the introduction of measures to encourage improvements in the safety and health of workers at work [1989] OJ L183/1.
[36]Sentencing Council, Health and Safety Offences, Corporate Manslaughter and Food Safety and Hygiene Offences Guideline: Assessment (Sentencing Council 2019).
[37] Konstantin Gusov and Valentina Tolkunova, Trudovoe Pravo Rossii (Moskva 2022).
[38]HSWA 1974, s 21.
[39]HSWA 1974, s 22.
[40]HSWA 1974, ss 21–22; HSE, ‘Fee for Intervention (FFI)’ (HSE, last updated 10 February 2025) <https://www.hse.gov.uk/fee-for-intervention> accessed 1 July 2026; HSE, ‘How HSE Regulates’ (HSE, last updated 25 March 2026) <https://www.hse.gov.uk/enforce/index.htm> accessed 1 July 2026.
[41]İSİG Meclisi (n 6).
[42]HSE (n 7).
[43]Ädilet Quqyq Buzuşylyq Turaly Kodeksi 2014 [Administrative Offences Code 2014] (Republic of Kazakhstan) No 235-V, 5 July 2014 <adilet.zan.kz/rus/docs/K1400000235> accessed 1 July 2026.
[44]HSWA 1974, ss 2, 40.
[45]Administrative Offences Code 2014 (n 44).
[46]Administrative Offences Code 2014 (n 44); Occupational Health and Safety Law art 26; Sentencing Council, Health and Safety Offences, Corporate Manslaughter and Food Safety and Hygiene Offences: Definitive Guideline (Sentencing Council 2019).
[47]Occupational Health and Safety Law art 25/8.
[48]Gary S Becker, ‘Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach’ (1968) 76 Journal of Political Economy 10.
[49]The Health and Safety (Fees) Regulations 2012, SI 2012/1652 (repealed; see Health and Safety and Nuclear (Fees) Regulations 2022, SI 2022/1378); Sentencing Council, ‘Home’ (Sentencing Council) <https://www.sentencingcouncil.org.uk> accessed 1 July 2026.
[50]İzzet Özgenç, Türk Ceza Hukuku Genel Hükümler (17th edn, Seçkin Yayınevi 2021) 362–370; Sami Narter, İş Sağlığı ve Güvenliği Hukukunda İdari, Cezai ve Hukuki Sorumluluk (Adalet Yayınevi 2018) 309; İ Aydınlı, İş Sağlığı ve Güvenliğinden Doğan Hukuki ve Cezai Sorumluluk [Civil and Criminal Liability Arising from Occupational Health and Safety] (2nd edn, Seçkin Yayıncılık 2021) 78–85; Narter (n 32) 45–52; Constitution of the Republic of Turkey art 38/7; Turkish Criminal Code (Law No 5237) art 20/2; Gözde Kaçmaz Keskin (n 36) 158–167.
[51]HSWA 1974, s 40; Salabiaku v France (1988) 13 EHRR 379, para 28; Davies v Health and Safety Executive [2002] EWCA Crim 2949; R v Chargot Ltd [2008] UKHL 73.
[52]TCK art 22/2–3.
[53]R v Adomako [1995] 1 AC 171, 187 (Lord Mackay of Clashfern LC).
[54]CMCHA 2007, s 1; Kaçmaz Keskin (n 36) 134–142.
[55]TCK art 22; Özgenç (n 51) 305–310.
[56]Özgenç (n 51) 362–370; Kaçmaz Keskin (n 36) 134–167.
[57]Court of Cassation, 12th Criminal Chamber, E 2020/11833, K 2024/4424.
[58]Court of Cassation, 12th Criminal Chamber, E 2020/11242, K 2024/4128; Narter (n 32) 145–158.
[59]Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (Mark Ritter tr, SAGE Publications 1992) 19–50.
[60]Beck (n 60) 19–50; Kaçmaz Keskin (n 36) 158–198.
[61]See Yener Ünver, ‘Ceza Hukukunda İzin Verilen Risk’ [Permitted Risk in Criminal Law] (PhD Thesis, Istanbul University 1996).
[62]International Labour Organization (n 3) 41.
