Translated material
"Offensive" amendments
The Ministry of Justice is preparing a bill to liberalize criminal legislation
The Ministry of Justice is preparing a new bill to transfer a number of crimes from criminal to administrative offenses. In addition, for some crimes, the upper limit of the punishment provided for their commission may be reduced. Thus, the category of their severity will be reduced.As the press service of the Ministry of Justice told Vremya Novostei, “it is too early to talk about any specifics,” since the working group to write this bill was created quite recently and has just started work. The Supreme Court has long been advocating the initiative to liberalize the Criminal Code; President Dmitry Medvedev approved it and, as Vremya Novostei learned, issued a special order instructing the Ministry of Justice to develop a bill. Minister of Justice Alexander Konovalov recently announced to the public that his department is dealing with this issue, and even named one of the articles that will most likely be excluded from the Criminal Code - insulting a government official (Article 319). And although there really are no specifics yet, many experts already have complaints about the upcoming reform.
The Chairman of the Supreme Court, Vyacheslav Lebedev, has repeatedly said in his public speeches that some criminal offenses of the so-called “private prosecution” should be decriminalized. According to him, such criminal acts as insult or battery, in terms of the degree of harm and social danger, are disproportionate to the punishments provided for their commission. For beatings that caused physical pain to the victim, but without any harm to health (Part 1 of Article 116 of the Criminal Code), or for insult - humiliation of the honor and dignity of a person, expressed in an indecent form (Part 1 of Article 130 of the Criminal Code), the perpetrator can not only pay a fine, be sentenced to correctional or compulsory labor, but also receive a criminal record. And this, as Mr. Lebedev noted, can have the most negative impact on the entire subsequent life of the offender - he may not be given a visa to foreign countries, and certain difficulties may arise with employment and career.
Minister of Justice Alexander Konovalov announced that the article “Insulting a representative of the authorities” will be decriminalized. This has caused confusion among many experts in legal circles. In particular, Vremya Novostey's sources in the judiciary find it strange that the minister named this particular article and did not say a word about insulting a private individual. “Insulting a government official is a more serious act than insulting a private person. In addition, the Criminal Code also has an article on insulting a military personnel. It’s strange that the Ministry of Justice approaches the question of which of these insults should be excluded from the code and what should be left in such a selective manner,” the source said. According to him, the task of the Ministry of Justice is also to figure out which of the crimes of medium gravity can and should be reduced in punishment for the same reason of disproportion between the crime committed and the impending liability. But what exactly we are talking about is still completely unclear.
The Supreme Court, however, is itself actively working to humanize the Criminal Code in its own direction. In particular, by the fall of 2009, they are preparing to adopt a resolution of the plenum of the court explaining the appointment of penalties for crimes committed. The main emphasis is supposed to be on ensuring that judges in their sentences impose not only imprisonment on convicts, as is most often the case, but also use alternative types of punishment provided for by the Criminal Code - arrest, compulsory and correctional labor.
By the fall, the Ministry of Justice, as the department's press service reported yesterday, may already present its own bill on liberalizing the Criminal Code. True, some authors of the code expressed indignation at the fact that the ministry did not involve legal scholars in this work. “Neither specialists from the Institute of State and Law of the Russian Academy of Sciences, nor professors at Moscow State University, nor the Prosecutor General’s Office, nor the Supreme Court have yet taken any part in the working group of the Ministry of Justice,” complained the chief researcher at the Institute of State and Law of the Russian Academy of Sciences, one of the authors of the Criminal Code, Doctor of Law, Sofya Kelina. “The very idea of liberalizing the Criminal Code is good, but what will come of it in the end is unknown.”