On the Practical Necessity of the Institution of Administrative Prejudice in the Criminal Legislation of Russia

The Russian criminal law is currently reviving the well-known institution of administrative prejudice. However, the lack of its legislative confirmation gives rise to disapproving assessment among penal law scholars. The legislators are blamed on the fact that, irrespective of the administrative prejudice, the subject is prosecuted for a number of identical offenses rather than for the crime committed. In general, the strive for the legal purity of the tasks of the criminal code (Article 2), the concept of crime (Article 14), the grounds for criminal liability (Article 8) makes these reproaches valid. However, the analysed behaviour of malicious offenders has demonstrated that the administrative law does not have the potential to prevent delict on part of such offenders. Therefore, administrative prejudice in the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation is a necessary and appropriate measure, which is confirmed by the position of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation expressed in the Resolution "On constitutionality of provisions of Article 212.1 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation in connection with the complaint of citizen I.I Dadin". Yet, not all options of administrative prejudice application in the current Criminal Code of the Russian Federation should be recognized as justified. The author argues that it is inadvisable to use this legal institution as an instrument for eliminating difficulties in applying the norms of criminal law, as, for example, in the amendments introduced to Article 157 of the Criminal Code, when the legislator replaced the attribute "malicious" in the evasion of payment for the maintenance of children or disabled parents with the definition "repeated", implying a person's non-payment of funds subjected to administrative punishment for a similar act (Note 1 to Article 157 of the Criminal Code). In this case, we observe a deliberate understatement of the social danger of the act. The uniform implementation of the criminal law policy through the application of administrative prejudice requires the introduction of a number of amendments to the General Part of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation and the Resolution of the Plenum of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation "On the practice of assigning criminal punishment by the courts of the Russian Federation".

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