Establishing the administrative and criminal responsibility during the high alert period

Abstract

The subject of research is norms of the current administrative and criminal legislation of the Russian Federation applied for violations of anti-epidemic restrictions. In 2020 the array of normative acts applicable in an emergency situation was significantly supplemented and need to be analyzed.The purpose of the study is to confirm or disprove hypothesis that legal certainty norms applied for violations of anti-epidemic restrictions and their position in the hierarchy of administrative-legal and criminal-legal prohibitions look rather dubious.The methodology. The authors choose the hypothetical-deductive method as the main method of this research. This method allowed to create a system of deductively related hypotheses from which statements about empirical facts are derived. The article analyzes the law enforcement practice that developed during the period of high alert.The main results of research and a field of their application. Their relationship between antiepidemic restrictions and permissible restrictions on fundamental human rights and freedoms is considered; an assessment of the proportionality of sanctions for violation of the generally binding rules of conduct is given; the socio-legal conditionality of the repressive legal support for the action of the high alert regime is analyzed. The main trends in law enforcement practice that have developed during the implementation of new administrative and legal and criminal law prohibitions are given. The findings can be useful to optimize law enforcement in the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.Conclusions. The legitimization of the pandemic alert regime (or high alert regime in other words) took place in a short period of time, as a result of which some defects of legal regulation can be named. So, to date, no clear gradation has been made between the high alert regime and the emergency regime; although the high alert regime has structurally taken shape as a legal concept in conjunction with ensuring the sanitary and epidemiological wellbeing of the population, its systemic relationship with the categories "quarantine", "prevention of the spread of diseases", "isolation" has not been developed, i.e. with concepts developed in such an area of scientific knowledge as epidemiology, and received partial consolidation in the norms of sanitary and epidemiological legislation. The high alert regime has undergone a significant transformation, turning from a set of recommendations addressed to the subjects of the unified state system for the prevention and elimination of emergencies into a wide list of legal provisions of various legal force, the effect of which applies to all groups of the population. In this regard, it is obvious that there is a demand in society for the unification of accepted norms and further structuring of a clear and unambiguous system of rules of conduct applicable in extreme situations that are not of an emergency nature, but require special control and special public attention. It follows from this that extraordinary legal regulation must acquire a consistent form and receive a strictly defined place in the national legal system.