The Influence of International Legal Standards for the Treatment of Prisoners on Their Resocialization

A large number of researchers of the penitentiary system studied the influence of international standards for the treatment of prisoners on the Russian penitentiary system. Their studies resulted in the general conclusion that, without taking into account international law, it is impossible to talk about the subsequent development of the national penal law. Thus, international standards for the treatment of prisoners have been identified as one of the dominant foreign policy factors that directly affect the penal policy and, accordingly, penal law. Meanwhile, there emerged new trends in the development of statehood caused by certain factors of foreign policy and foreign economy. In his annual Address to the Federal Assembly in 2020, the president of the Russian Federation announced a completely new concept of the priority of the Constitution of the Russian Federation over international law. This in no way curtails the significance of the latter in the domestic system of law, but now reference to international law will be possible only in parts that do not restrict the rights and freedoms of a citizen and do not contradict to the Constitution of the Russian Federation. Such a decision cannot be called new, because for a long time there has been a discussion in the theory of law about the appropriateness of giving international legal norms a higher legal force, and with each year the arguments against have become increasingly convincing and justified. However, it is worth noting that the international standards for the treatment of prisoners have not yet exhausted their potential and the need to implement a number of norms in Russian penal laws is still relevant. In the authors’ opinion, the forms of their implementation should be the following: direct application of the provisions of international documents through incorporation or reference; transformation into the norms of Russian laws. In order to argue the need for the implementation, the authors aim to analyse the impact of international standards for the treatment of prisoners on the Russian penal laws. Since one of the priority tasks of the modern penitentiary system is the prevention of new crimes, the authors select standards that contribute to prisoners’ resocialization: the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (the Nelson Mandela Rules)); Recommendation Rec(2006)2 of the Committee of Ministers to Member States on the European Prison Rules; the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Administration of Juvenile Justice (the Beijing Rules), and others. Achieving the aim allows not only classifying the norms under study, but also identifying principles that will contribute to prisoners’ most efficient resocialization.

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