Criminal Violations of Land Legal Relationships as Integral Destructive Consequences of Liberalizing Land Rights: Genesis and Mechanism of Encroachment

Abstract

The author raises the problem that is common in post-Soviet Russia: counteracting crimes in the sphere of land relationships. Their most dangerous and serial type is transition of the ownership rights to land resources that are public or municipal property, or private property of citizens. The article presents a short historical overview aimed at a deeper and more objective understanding of this phenomenon and studying its origins. The author concludes that an extensive interest of criminals in criminal official registration of land property rights was encouraged by a number of long-term, but often badly coordinated and even contradictory trends in the sphere of land reform that, in the end, led to very unfavorable and paradoxical consequences. The author uses the terminological instruments of the criminalistic teaching on the mechanism of crime and a representative empirical base of 187 researched criminal cases in the sphere of land relationships to examine the specific features of these criminal actions mechanism. The author outlines the structure of the crime mechanism whose understanding is a necessary key to a comprehensive and complete investigation of such actions. The normative documents lack a uniform definition of the term «crimes in the sphere of land relationships», so the author summarizes information from the empirical sources and presents a list of typical offences included in this group, interpreting criminal law norms as sources of information for the development of complex criminalistic methods. The article also includes characteristics of typical subjects of these actions, that are broken into four categories, and the specific features of the methods of committing these crimes. It allowed the author to identify typical gaps in the evidence foundations for the criminal cases of this category and to present methodological and criminalistic recommendations on bridging these gaps through the improvement of the organization of the investigation and the procedural actions themselves.