Problems and Prospects of Administrative Prejudice in the Criminal Law of Russia

Abstract

Introduction. The emergence and then increase during the current decade of the number of corpus delicti with administrative prejudice in the acting Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (hereinafter referred to as the Code, the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation) proves the good result achieved by the legislators in implementation of this legal construct of the Special part of the Code, as well as the efficiency of this tool in fulfilling the current policy of our state referring to the criminal law. Every year a number of such kind of corpus delicti in the Code is only increasing, which indicates the correctness of the policy taken by the legislators more than ten years ago on integrating it into the Code. The aim of the study is to identify the features and problems in the legislative design of the corpus delicti with the administrative prejudice in the Russian criminal law and to propose ways to optimize the corpus delicti of particularly this kind of offences.Materials and Methods. The methodological basis of the research are the provisions of the national criminal law, for which the corpus delicti with administrative prejudice are foreseen, studied both in historical and present day aspects, criminal laws of the near-abroad countries, as well as the scientific works of the researchers studying this topic. The following methodological tools have been used during the research: the general scientific, as well as some specific scientific methods, i.e., dialectical, system analysis, legalistic, comparative legal and other methods.Results. The historical and present day aspects of the administrative prejudice application in design of corpus delicti, the features of design of the corpus delicti with administrative prejudice and various variants of prejudice integrated by the legislators in the acting criminal law of the Russian Federation have been analysed. The legislative examples of the administrative prejudice application in some of the Criminal Codes of the CIS countries have been provided. The authors’ own standpoint regarding the presence of the corpus delicti with administrative prejudice in the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation has been expressed. The authors’ conclusions and suggestions on optimisation and expansion of such norms in the acting criminal law of the Russian Federation have been made. The tendency for the further increase of the number of corpus delicti with administrative prejudice in the acting Criminal Code of the Russian Federation has been supported.Discussion and Conclusion. The conducted research is considered important for the Russian juridical science due to the classification of the prejudices presented by the authors, which implies the availability of "classical" (simple) and "double" (complex) administrative prejudice in the corpus delicti. The amendments proposed by the authors to a number of provisions of the Special part of the Code, in particular, to Articles 180, 213, 330 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation about including the administrative prejudice, as a mandatory feature of the objective side of the above corpus delicti, are recommended to be used in further research of the corpus delicti with administrative prejudice