Die strafrechtliche Produkthaftung des Berechnungsingenieurs

Penal product liability of calculation engineers

Calculation engineers bear notable responsibility for their professional actions. The scale of the operations and penal product liability of the individual engineer derived from that, depends on the particular industry, task profile as well as the concrete kind of activity. Still, most calculation engineers are not distinctly aware of the extent of responsibility they take over.
Besides the technical risks, judicial ones connected to potentially created damage exist. These risks include the non-insurable warranty, civil liability in cases of personal, material and financial damages as well as penal consequences in the event of physical injury and death in particular.
The hall collapses in Swiss' Uster (1985), Bad Reichenhall (2006) and St. Gallen (2010), the crashing oil platform Sleipner A (1991) as well as the fatal ICE accident in Eschede (1998) revealed this judicial risk.
This article is supposed to give an overview of the penal consequences for calculation engineers and is thus addressed to freelance engineers as well as enterprises and engineers that perform calculation services as part of their corporate-internal product development.