ВЕДОМСТВЕННЫЙ КОНТРОЛЬ ИЛИ (И) ПРОКУРОРСКИЙ НАДЗОР ЗА СЛЕДСТВИЕМ?

Abstract

As a result of the 2007-2010 reform, the prosecutor’s office lost the right to initiate criminal investigations and independently investigate them, a significant part of the prosecutor’s authority to supervise the investigative activities of the investigator was transferred from the prosecutor to the head of the investigating authority. These changes have been mixed among practitioners and process scientists. The author considers it inappropriate to return to the prosecutor the right to initiate criminal proceedings, since the prosecutor will have to carry out the whole complex of procedural and investigative actions referred to in art. 144 Code of Criminal Procedure. There is no need to return to the prosecutor’s office and the investigative function, since the prosecutor’s office will become a body of criminal prosecution and supervision and investigation, which will affect the objectivity of its actions and will nullify all the reforms of the investigation carried out over the past 20 years. Nor should powers be transferred to the prosecutor, which as a result of the reform passed to the head of the investigative body. Almost all the powers of the head of the investigative body to implement departmental control over the procedural activities of the investigator to some extent also belong to the prosecutor using special methods of prosecutorial response. The specificity is that the head of the investigating authority uses both the methods of previous and subsequent control, and the prosecutor mainly uses the subsequent one. It is proposed to provide the prosecutor with only one additional authority in relation to the investigator: to give the prosecutor the right, when approving the indictment, to exclude certain points of the charge from it or to re-qualify the charge to a less serious one instead of returning the criminal case to the investigator for these purposes.