The Federation Council commuted the punishment for criminal police officers

The Federation Council excluded the commission of a crime by a policeman from the list of aggravating circumstances, TASS reports . We are talking about the approval of the corresponding amendment to the Criminal Code, adopted by the State Duma on May 30 (Federal Law “On invalidating paragraph “o” of part one of Article 63 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation”).

The authors of the amendment consider it “anti-discrimination”. In the explanatory note they say: “Law and order in Russia is ensured, in addition to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, by employees of the courts, the prosecutor’s office, the FSB, the Federal Security Service, the Russian Guard, the Federal Penitentiary Service, the military police, customs, etc. The fact that the offender belongs to these structures is not an aggravating circumstance, which is clearly unfair "

Meanwhile, as Team Against Torture lawyer Petr Khromov told Advokatskaya Street, “police officers are still given suspended sentences quite often. If the bill is adopted, then, in conjunction with other initiatives, it will obviously affect the number of sentences with real imprisonment for employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.”

In October 2022, when the project was submitted to the State Duma, lawyer Pavel Chikov recalled that police service was made an aggravating circumstance when committing a crime during Medvedev’s police reform in 2010. Then this amendment was justified by “strengthening the protection of the rights and legitimate interests of citizens and organizations from unlawful actions of employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and increasing the level of their responsibility to society.”