Countering extremism through the lens of statistics and jurisprudence: some highlights

Since the early 2000s, the danger of extremism to society and the state has led to the formation of special national anti-extremist legislation and the intensification of the state's efforts to counter this phenomenon. The results of the analysis of statistical data posted on the websites of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation and the Judicial Department under the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, as well as the study of acts of courts of general jurisdiction, have allowed us to identify a number of points that cast doubt on the effectiveness of countering extremist offences. It would seem that the effectiveness can be evidenced by a steady upward trend in the detection of extremist offences against the background of a decrease in the total number of registered offences. At the same time, the detection rate of extremist offences is significantly higher than the average detection rate for all registered offences. However, the number of criminal cases of extremist offences brought before the courts is sometimes 4.5 times less than the number of registered offences in this category. Most of the criminal cases submitted to the courts before 2019 were initiated on the grounds of committing crimes under Article 282 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, and after 2019 - on the grounds of committing crimes under Article 280 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. Administrative prejudice, introduced in December 2018, was supposed as a prevention of a formal approach to bringing to criminal liability for the commission of offences under Part 1 of Article 282 of the Criminal Code of the RF. In practice, administrative prejudice led to the fact that the offences qualified before 2019 under Art. 282 of the Criminal Code of the RF, after 2019 began to be qualified under Art. 280 of the Criminal Code of the RF. Such a "manoeuvre" was possible due to the competition of norms provided for by Articles 280 and 282 of the Criminal Code of the RF. Based on the decisions studied, there is often a rather long time interval between the facts of committing incriminated acts and decisions to initiate criminal proceedings, which allows us to formulate an assumption about the documentation of crimes "on occasion", to ensure performance indicators. This judgement is also confirmed by the content of the circumstances set out in the judicial acts, which testify to the obvious nature of the incriminated acts qualified under Article 282 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, consisting mainly in reposts of materials available on the Internet. The above points allow us to conclude that the objectification of the facts of extremist crimes is determined not by the activation of countering extremism, but by the necessity and convenience of fulfilling the indicators by which the effectiveness of law enforcement agencies is assessed. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

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