The Ministry of Justice published the second version of the draft of the new Code of Administrative Offenses

The Ministry of Justice has published another version of its draft of the new Code of Administrative Offenses.

On May 29, 2020, the Ministry of Justice of Russia resubmitted for public discussion the draft of the new Code of Administrative Offenses (CAO). Several changes have been made to it regarding anti-extremist articles.

Art. 39.3 of the Code of Administrative Offenses (an analogue of the current article 20.29 on the mass distribution of extremist materials) provides for a significant mitigation of penalties for individual entrepreneurs compared to the first version of the draft , published in January 2020: the amount of the fine for them is now from 2 to 5 thousand rubles. However, if in the January draft the Ministry of Justice proposed to reduce the amount of fines for legal entities on it and not suspend their activities, now the department proposes to leave fines at the level of 100 thousand to a million rubles and only reduce the maximum period for suspending the activities of a legal entity from 90 days to 30.

According to Art. 39.4 of the Code of Administrative Offenses on inciting hatred (similar to Article 20.3.1 of the current Code of Administrative Offenses), it is proposed to reduce the maximum period of compulsory work from 100 hours to 60.

In Art. 39.5 of the new Code of Administrative Offenses on the promotion and public display of prohibited symbols and paraphernalia, the Ministry of Justice still proposes to establish uniform sanctions for the demonstration and sale of such paraphernalia, corresponding to the sanctions of Part 1 of Art. 20.3 of the current Code of Administrative Offenses, and introduce punishment for individual entrepreneurs in the form of a fine in the amount of 5 to 10 thousand rubles. In the current Code of Administrative Offenses, Part 2 of Art. 20.3 (on the manufacture and sale of prohibited paraphernalia or symbols) provides for more severe penalties than part 1 (on its promotion and demonstration), so we can talk about some softening of the norm. Earlier, the Ministry of Justice also proposed to introduce into Art. 39.5 of the Code of Administrative Offenses, punishment for citizens in the form of compulsory work, however, apparently, the department abandoned this idea.

If in January the Ministry of Justice proposed to include the vague term "administrative offenses of an extremist orientation" in the Code of Administrative Offenses, in the new version of the draft it is replaced by "administrative offenses consisting in violation of the norms of the legislation of the Russian Federation on countering extremism." Such offenses will be considered gross, and cases on them will not be dismissed for insignificance.

Sanctions Part 5 Art. 14.1 (an analogue of the current part 4 of article 20.1 of the Code of Administrative Offenses on repeated "insulting the authorities"), the Ministry of Justice previously proposed supplementing with compulsory work, but, as follows from the new text of the draft code, this will not be done. As suggested, the new Code of Administrative Offenses will not include an analogue of Part 5 of Art. 20.1 of the Code of Administrative Offenses (on violation of the rule on "insulting the authorities" more than two times).

The Ministry of Justice insists that the statute of limitations for bringing to administrative responsibility in the general case should be one year, but for a number of articles - more. In particular, for gross administrative offenses it is proposed to set a period of two years. At the same time, the statute of limitations for violations, in particular, of the legislation on the media (except for the article on the abuse of freedom of mass information), in the field of information processing, for offenses infringing on the order of administration and public morality, is proposed to be set at the level of two months or three months for cases before the court. In the current Code of Administrative Offenses, the statute of limitations is two to three months in most cases (but, in particular, under Article 20.3.1 of the Code of Administrative Offenses - a year).

It should be noted that the second version of the draft of the new Code of Administrative Offenses did not take into account the comments of human rights activists from Memorial, OVD-Info, Civic Assistance, and Advocatskaya Street. An exception was the proposal to grant the right to free legal assistance to persons in respect of whom an administrative offense case has been initiated.

Sources

• Code of the Russian Federation on Administrative Offenses // Federal portal of projects of normative legal acts. May 29, 2020
• The Ministry of Justice rejected most of the comments of experts to the new Code of Administrative Offenses // Lawyer Street. 2020. June 22.