3 Nullum Crimen Sine Lege (No Crime without Law)

The rule: no act may be punished as a crime unless it was an offence under law at the time it was done. Its ancestors: Feuerbach's classic formulation; Article 22 of the French Declaration (1789)'sfamily; the ICCPR, Article 15 (Nepal a party — its criminal-legality guarantee binding in treaty law). Its multiple dimensions (learn as four):1. Legality (no crime without statute/common-law basis): conduct cannot be criminalized by analogy or judicial invention — the civil-law reading; in Nepal's fully codified system, crimes are creatures of the Code and special statutes;2. Non-retroactivity: the law must pre-exist the act (Section 7);3. Certainty/lex certa: the law must be ascertainable and sufficiently definite — vague criminalization fails the principle (Nepal's Supreme Court has tested statutory vagueness in this spirit — the Manish Shrestha line);4. Strict construction (lex stricta): penal texts construed narrowly (Section 5).Its practical consequences in Nepali procedure: charges framed strictly on pre-existing offences; courts powerless to create common-law crimes; customary or "obvious evil" conduct unpunishable absent legislation (the legislator's, not the judge's, duty).