Procedural acts of criminal law application

Within the framework of criminal procedure activities, a significant number of individual acts are to be issued on the basis of criminal law norms (the decision to initiate a criminal case, acts of notification of a person about criminal prosecution, etc.). The term "application of criminal law" is used by legislators only in relation to sentences and other final court acts. Some researchers believe that application of the material law in the case is a one-time activity, associated with the application of measures of a criminal nature to the person who committed the crime. Other legal scholars admit that application of criminal law is carried out not only at the end, but also in the process of proceedings in the case, because to apply the criminal law does not only mean to solve the question about the guilt of the person and punishment under criminal law. The investigative body or court enforces criminal law whenever they have to apply to it to resolve an issue. When passing a guilty sentence, the court applies both the disposition and the sanction of the norm in full. Other bodies and officials (e.g. the investigator) apply only the disposition of a criminal law norm. At the same time, the reference to the disposition of the article of the Special Part of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation entails certain procedural consequences. Most of the interviewed lawyers and law enforcement officers share the latter of the above approaches. There are reasons for this, arising from the analysis of norms of the Penal Code of the Russian Federation. Individual procedural acts, which are carried out on the basis of criminal law norms, can be differentiated into two types. The first are the acts of preliminary application of criminal law, they reflect the results of the ongoing process (intermediate procedural decisions). The second are the acts of the main application of criminal law; they act as a condition for further implementation of the norms of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation in the form of enforcement or just confirm their implementation in the form of compliance or use (final procedural decisions). Individual acts of criminal procedure are the acts of application of criminal law, if two criteria are available. The first one is a "regulatory" criterion. It involves enshrining the material and legal conditions for making appropriate procedural decisions in the form of a blanket rule of the Penal Code of the Russian Federation with reference to the disposition or sanction of criminal law or through the use of general wordings of criminal Law. Another criterion is a substantive one since the act of applying criminal law should contain a conclusion about the specifics of criminal-legal relations.

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