Daily Journal:

The statement of the Prosecutor General cannot but be welcomed. It can be considered that this is one of the indications that the task that was set when separating the tasks of investigation and supervision of the investigation can be partially solved. The task of the prosecutor's office has always been to supervise the investigation. Once upon a time, it combined both the investigation and supervision of the investigation. Now it is divided, this division has been fought for a long time. It must be said that when, after this division, attacks against human rights activists appeared in some statements of the Investigative Committee at the Prosecutor's Office, upon closer examination it turned out that these were attacks against their own twin, namely the prosecutor's office. Separation is a thing necessary precisely so that oversight of the investigation is not hampered by a conflict of interests: on the one hand, the desire to reveal everything quickly, and on the other, the requirement to comply with the law. If we turn to the recently published collection of articles by Stanislav Markelov, who directly commented on the very process of dividing the functions of the prosecutor’s office, then there we can read quite meaningful comments about how necessary this is, but also how painful it is.

The following is also important: according to our legislation, a lawyer cannot familiarize himself with all the materials of a criminal case until the investigation is completed. Let's see if the prosecutor's office will be able to conduct effective supervision, that is, draw any conclusions, getting acquainted with the entire body of evidence collected by investigators, and not just with the subset that proves one selected version. Actually, this is the task of separating the functions of inquiry, preliminary investigation, supervision of the investigation, and then the court, in order to consistently and repeatedly recheck and evaluate the collected evidence. As the hero of the historical detective story Umberto Eco said, monk William of Baskerville, “I try to

there were several mistakes at once, otherwise you become a slave

the only one."