Issues of improving legislation about expert activity

Abstract

The article deals with the problems of legal regulation of expert activity. It is noted that there are many regulatory legal acts that regulate the conduct of various examinations. The article analyzes the legislation regulating the conduct of both non-judicial and judicial examinations, including supranational ones. Although non-judicial examinations are diverse, the article notes that their legal regulation has much in common, but general issues are not regulated uniformly in the absence of grounds for this, since we are talking about issues that are not related to the specifics of a particular examination. And this, in the authors opinion, is a lack of legal regulation of expert activity. The article examines the novelties of the legislation on forensic examinations, in particular, conducted by non-state experts. Attention is drawn to all the main problems of legal regulation that have been discussed since 2012, when work began on a new law on judicial expert activity, but have not been resolved by the legislator. Attention is paid to the legal regulation of the activities of forensic experts. The article concludes that the courts are suspicious of the conclusions of expert examinations conducted by non-judicial experts when considering disputes between regulatory authorities and interested parties, as well as when considering criminal and administrative cases. Often, examinations conducted for the purpose of control are groundlessly rejected by the court, and the court appoints forensic examinations, which are entrusted to experts who do not have the necessary knowledge, experience, methods, equipment; they accept them on faith, without establishing the reasons for discrepancies between experts, without conducting the necessary procedural actions. That is, not being experts, the judges unreasonably decide which of the two expert opinions to accept. As a result, significant harm can be caused to the state interests, which is shown by the example of customs examinations. It is also noted that there are many similarities between forensic examinations and, for example, examinations conducted for control purposes. It is proposed to formulate a single law on the basis of expert activity, not limited only to judicial expert activity. The issues that require legal regulation are listed. The need to take into account the achievements of the legislation of the Eurasian Economic Union on expertise in the development of national legislation was noted.