Abstract
The article deals with the issues relevant for the criminal proceedings of Russia, connected with the practical need of legislative consolidation of procedural rules fixed in the Code of Criminal Procedure of the Russian Federation (CCP RF) that provide a possibility for the court to alter charges brought by preliminary investigation bodies. The current procedural rules, to change accusation for a graver verdict, establish the procedure enshrined in Article 237 of the CCP RF, according to which the court must return a criminal case to the prosecutor, while the latter has to return the same to the investigator (interrogating officer). This practice in fact returns the law enforcer to the provisions of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic Code of Criminal Procedure that maintained the existence of the institute of supplementary investigation; the court annually returned from 40 to 55 thousand cases to investigators within the framework of this institute. Having set the goal to explore the problematic issues of amending a faulty accusation in court and finding an optimal legal mechanism for the court’s amending a charge towards its stiffening, the authors, using the methods of scientific knowledge – dialectical approach, comparative legal method, statistical and systemic analysis – analysed the scholarly views on the said problem and the practice of enforcing Article 237 of the CCP RF by Russian courts; made a comparative research of foreign laws governing the issues of alteration of court charges. The authors, on the basis of the research results, made a conclusion on the need to develop an efficient legislative procedure in terms of altering indictment towards a more serious verdict by the prosecution – directly at the court session, under supervision of the court and without returning a case for supplementary investigation.
Highlights
The quality and efficiency of the preliminary investigation is an immutable sore point of the Russian criminal justice
The procedure of return of a criminal case to the prosecutor, that was introduced into the Russian criminal procedure by the RF Code of Criminal Procedure adopted in 2001, replaced the completely abolished institute of supplementary judicial investigation
The institute envisaging return of cases to the prosecutor was solely aimed at removing certain obstacles to judicial consideration of a case – those being a result of formal, procedural flaws relating to preparation and presentation of the indictment (Art. 237, Cl. 1, part 1, of the Criminal Procedure of the Russian Federation (CCP RF)), and it was supposed to ensure timely and dynamic consideration of cases by the court
Summary
The quality and efficiency of the preliminary investigation is an immutable sore point of the Russian criminal justice. The institute envisaging return of cases to the prosecutor was solely aimed at removing certain obstacles to judicial consideration of a case – those being a result of formal, procedural flaws relating to preparation and presentation of the indictment (Art. 237, Cl. 1, part 1, of the CCP RF), and it was supposed to ensure timely and dynamic consideration of cases by the court. This effect was, achieved: the return of cases from the litigation stage to the preliminary consideration stage decreased from 41,340 cases in 1999 to 6,468 and 6,466 cases in 2018 and 2019, respectively [3]
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