“Person of Interest” in Russian Criminal Proceedings

Abstract

Used in the U.S. law enforcement system, the term “person of Interest” refers to a person who is the subject of a police investigation but who has not been recognized by an investigator as a suspect in a crime. The procedural significance of this category is that such person is analyzed with the use of legal and near-legal means (without explaining to him/her Miranda warnings) for the involvement in a committed or impending crime before a formal decision is made against him/her in order to involve him/her in a particular status in criminal proceedings. This phenomenon, characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon system of law, also takes place in Russian legal reality. In the domestic scientific literature, such person is proposed to be called “suspected”, “potential suspect”, “person of operational interest”, “person being investigated”. Analysis of the decisions of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation allows us to establish that the figure of the suspect has long been known to the body of constitutional review, and in its practice the Court has repeatedly expressed itself about the possibility of such person involving a lawyer in the operational-search activities. Given that operational-search activities are used to form an evidence base for a significant number of criminal cases, an intensive convergence of criminal proceedings and operational-search activities should be noted. In this regard, it is necessary to introduce legislatively elements and guarantees of legal protection of the person from illegal and unreasonable operational prosecution into the structure of operational-search activities. The category “person of interest” should receive its official name and procedural status in Russian criminal operational and procedural law (which does not yet exist). As a result, the author proposes to complete the Law on the Conduct of Operational-search Activities with definitions of the concepts of “suspected” and “operational prosecution”, as well as entrench the list of rights of the suspected person with his/her participation in operational-search activities, primarily the right to use the services of a lawyer.