The article deals with the issues relevant for the criminal proceedings of Russia, connected with the practical need of legislative consolidation of procedural rules fixed in the Code of Criminal Procedure of the Russian Federation (CCP RF) that provide a possibility for the court to alter charges brought by preliminary investigation bodies. The current procedural rules, to change accusation for a graver verdict, establish the procedure enshrined in Article 237 of the CCP RF, according to which the court must return a criminal case to the prosecutor, while the latter has to return the same to the investigator (interrogating officer). This practice in fact returns the law enforcer to the provisions of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic Code of Criminal Procedure that maintained the existence of the institute of supplementary investigation; the court annually returned from 40 to 55 thousand cases to investigators within the framework of this institute. Having set the goal to explore the problematic issues of amending a faulty accusation in court and finding an optimal legal mechanism for the court’s amending a charge towards its stiffening, the authors, using the methods of scientific knowledge – dialectical approach, comparative legal method, statistical and systemic analysis – analysed the scholarly views on the said problem and the practice of enforcing Article 237 of the CCP RF by Russian courts; made a comparative research of foreign laws governing the issues of alteration of court charges. The authors, on the basis of the research results, made a conclusion on the need to develop an efficient legislative procedure in terms of altering indictment towards a more serious verdict by the prosecution – directly at the court session, under supervision of the court and without returning a case for supplementary investigation.
An adversarial nature of any trial, characteristic of justice and corresponding to its nature, is manifested in criminal proceedings not only in criminal cases, but also in cases addressing issues related to the execution of the sentence. The paper examines the peculiarities of the adversarial construction of judicial proceedings at the stage of execution of the sentence pre-conditioned by the tasks and the specific subject of judicial proceedings in a particular category of cases. The author elucidates the specifics of the conflict relationship, the essence of the legal dispute and the subject composition of procedural parties in cases where issues related to the execution of punishment are resolved. Also, the author analyzes the problems of ensuring equality of the parties and the undefined role of the prosecutor at the execution stage, suggests ways to address them at the legislative level. Finally, it is concluded that there is a need to improve the procedural form of dealing with issues related to the execution of sentences in accordance with the principles of adversarial proceedings and equality and taking into account the peculiarities of their manifestations in judicial proceedings arising during the execution of the sentence.
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