What Article 165 of the Criminal Code punishes
Article 165 does not define a stand-alone offence: it is an aggravating clause that applies to the two offences in the previous chapter, unlawful detention and kidnapping, whenever one of three circumstances is present. The first is that the act is carried out through simulation of authority or a public function: for example, someone who poses as a police officer to detain another person; since they are not a genuine official, they are liable as a private individual under Article 163, but with this aggravation added. The second is that the victim is a minor or a person with a disability in need of special protection. The third is that the victim is a public official acting in the exercise of their duties: here it is the penalty of whoever deprives the official of their liberty that is aggravated, not the official's own liability.
This last scenario should not be confused with Article 167, which aggravates the opposite situation: where it is the authority or public official themselves who, outside the cases permitted by law, carries out the unlawful detention or kidnapping. Article 165 protects a victim who happens to be a public official; Article 167 toughens the penalty for an offender who is one.
Penalty
The article imposes the penalties of Articles 163 and 164 in their upper half. Simple unlawful detention under Article 163.1, punished with four to six years' imprisonment, therefore becomes five to six years; if the detention has lasted more than fifteen days (Article 163.3, five to eight years), the aggravation raises it to six years and six months to eight years. Kidnapping with a demand under Article 164, punished with six to ten years' imprisonment, becomes eight to ten years. The same upper-half rule also reaches the mitigated forms and the fine under Article 163.4.
Concurrence of circumstances and Article 167
Article 165 itself allows the aggravation to apply "in the respective cases", meaning more than one circumstance can concur in the same act. The article sets no further bracket for multiple circumstances concurring, so weighing them together is left to the court within the upper half already described.
Defence strategy
Defending against a charge aggravated under Article 165 starts by checking whether there was genuinely a simulation of authority, or whether the victim could reasonably have believed the action was lawful. Where the victim is a public official, it is decisive to establish whether they were actually exercising their duties at the time, since the aggravation does not apply outside that exercise. And the exact duration of the deprivation of liberty — decisive for moving from the four-to-six-year bracket to the five-to-eight-year one — requires a precise chronological reconstruction of events.