ВЛИЯНИЕ ИЗМЕНЕНИЙ Ч. 1 СТ. 144 УПК РФ НА СТАДИЮ ВОЗБУЖДЕНИЯ УГОЛОВНОГО ДЕЛА

Abstract

In 2013, based on Federal law No. 23-FZ, part 1 of Art. 144 of the RF Criminal Procedure Code was amended: it became allowed to carry out various procedural, investigative, and other actions; to explain to the participants of these actions their rights; to consider information obtained when examining crime reports as evidence. These amendments both considerably influenced understanding of the very beginning of a criminal case initiation and produced significant problems in collecting, checking, and assessing evidence as the structural elements of the proof process. The theoretical study shows that having the right to carry out procedural, investigative, and other activities at the stage of initiating a criminal case enshrined, the legislator omitted two very significant aspects. The first one is the absence of possibility to perform some actions in the order established by the RF Criminal Procedure Code as the procedure of such actions, for instance, getting the explanations, seizure of documents and things, is not regulated in any way by the RF Criminal Procedure Code. The actions regulated by the RF Criminal Procedure Code (forensic investigation appointment, examination, etc.) can be performed only within the frame of an initiated criminal case. The second one is that the expanded capabilities of investigation authorities at the stage of the criminal case initiation dissolved the boundaries between the preliminary investigation stage and the stage of initiating a criminal case actually turning the stage of initiating a criminal case into the “investigation imitation” carried out apart from the criminal procedure principles specified for the investigation.