Criminal Misconduct: An Objective Need or a Declared Necessity?

Abstract

The actively defended idea of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation on the inclusion of an offencse of criminal misconduct in the criminal legislation was reflected in the revised draft federal law submitted to the Parliament on October 13, 2020. The purpose of the study is to determine the key changes in the content of the institutions of criminal misconduct and other measures of a criminal law nature proposed for consolidation in the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, to assess the objective need of the reforms initiated by the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation. The methodological basis is a set of methods of scientific knowledge. General scientific (analysis and synthesis, dialectics) and specific scientific research methods (system structural, formal legal) were used. A comparative analysis of draft laws allows us to classify the substantive content of acts constituting a criminal misconduct as key changes and the modification of other measures of a criminal legal nature. The authors critically assess the idea underlying the classification of acts as criminal misconduct. By laying in the criteria for the isolation of acts that are minimal in terms of the degree of danger, not legally significant elements of corpus delicti, but the types and amount of punishments, the lack of criminal experience, the interests of the business community, the developers of the draft law violate the system of law, since the proposed approach excludes the assessment of the public danger of the act based on the significance of the protected by the criminal the law of public relations. The meaning of the differentiation of criminal liability declared by the initiator of the reforms is lost with the proposed duplication of other measures applied both to persons who have committed a criminal misconduct and to those guilty of committing crimes of small or medium gravity, and the proposed conditional nature of other measures levels the idea of liberalizing the criminal law. The paper focuses on the provisions of the project that require revision and additional comprehension.