Abuse of Rights, Its Prevention and Suppression in Russian Criminal Process: Some Research Results

Abstract

The problem of abuse of rights in the criminal process is currently widely discussed by both researchers and practicing specialists. However, until today there has been no large-scale representative research of law enforcement practice or surveys of law enforcement employees focusing on this issue. The article analyzes some results of researching the practice of law enforcement. The study was conducted by the authors in 2016–2017 within the framework of the project «Abuse of Rights in the Criminal Process: Systemic and Non-Systemic Manifestations, their Prevention and Suppression». The authors studied archives of criminal cases, appeal and cassational proceedings, complaints filed under Art. 125 of the Criminal Procedure Code of the Russian Federation, complaints from the archive of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation, and published court judgments. The paper presents situations that were classified by law enforcers or could (according to expert evaluations) be classified as the abuse of rights by the criminal proceedings’ participants, the authors systematize the identified forms of the abuse of rights, evaluate the scale and character of these forms (systemic or non-systemic), determine causes and conditions that contributed to the emergence of some cases of the abuse of rights, describe measures of improving the criminal procedure legislation aimed at eliminating the causes of systemic abuse of rights, describe effective ways of preventing and suppressing some types of actual abusive behavior, argue that in some cases the abuse of legal rights is caused by the behavior of officials, and also that the state and law enforcers involved in a criminal case should show certain tolerance to the possible abuse of rights if it is not systemic in order to provide a maximally full legal protection of proceedings’ participants.