Punishing finger

The Duma will give the president the right to remove governors for any crimes

Last Friday, the State Duma approved in the first reading amendments to the Criminal and Criminal Procedure Codes of Russia, allowing the president to remove governors from office on the recommendation of the prosecutor’s office not only for serious and especially serious crimes, as was the case before, but for any crimes in general. The document was submitted to the House by the Russian government.

As the representative of the Cabinet of Ministers in the State Duma, Andrei Loginov, explained to the deputies, the degree of severity should not be of fundamental importance if we are talking about an official of such a level as the governor. According to him, the very fact of committing a crime indicates that the governor “loses the moral, ethical and moral grounds to remain in office.”

The document also increases punishment for officials for improper performance of their duties. The fine for official forgery, for example, increases from 80 thousand rubles. up to 500 thousand, and the term of imprisonment was increased from two to four years. Articles of the Criminal Code “Forgery of Officials” and “Negligence” are proposed to be supplemented with “signs of a significant violation of the rights and legitimate interests of citizens or organizations or legally protected interests of society or the state.” In addition, if previously the article “Negligence” was tried only for causing major damage, then now it can be applied to officials who committed terrorist attacks on the territory under their jurisdiction.

As the explanatory note to the government initiative states, all these innovations “are caused by the recent operational situation in the constituent entities of Russia, which is potentially dangerous in terms of committing crimes of a terrorist nature.” The authors of the document note that in Russia “certain territories are used for training terrorists with the actual connivance of officials responsible for ensuring public order and public safety.” Moreover, this happens as a result of both the negligence of officials and their selfish intentions.

“The law will improve the effectiveness of preventive measures in the fight against terrorism, and will also ensure fair and proportionate punishment for those who contributed to the commission of crimes through their actions,” Andrei Loginov emphasized at the State Duma meeting.

Deputies approved the government amendments almost unanimously - 419 votes. True, the first deputy chairman of the Duma committee on civil, criminal, arbitration and procedural legislation, Valery Grebennikov, noted that the Duma will not rush to the final adoption of the bill. “The parliamentary majority represented by United Russia members is aware of how complex and sensitive the issue of increasing liability for official offenses is, and when finalizing the bill for the second reading, we will very carefully and without haste analyze all the amendments that will be submitted to this document,” the deputy said Grebennikov.

Ksenia VERETENNIKOVA