On some changes in the criminal anti-corruption legislation

The subject matter of the article is the analysis of new anti-corruption norms in the existing criminal legislation of Russia, and determination of the directions to improve the criminal legal mechanism for the prevention of corruption. Having analyzed the existing anti-corruption legislation, the authors came to a conclusion on merits and demerits of criminal legislation in the sphere of anti-corruption. According to official statistics both the number of registered corruption-related crimes and the number of previously investigated crimes provided for in Article 290 (bribe taking) of the Criminal Code of Russia in the last five years have fallen by one and a half times and two and a half times respectively. Moreover, there still is interest in the problems of corruption prevention including the measures of criminal and legal character. In many respects, this can be explained by the fact that legislators constantly introduce changes to the norms, which provide criminal liability for the commission of "corruption-related crimes". These changes can conditionally be divided into those having a so-called technical character and those having a substantial character. When writing the article, the authors set the task to implement the analysis of changes of criminal rules of law in Russia in recent years; they used dialectic, formal and logical, comparative and legal methods. It is noted that along with criminalization and improvement of the norms providing for responsibility for manifestation of corruption in the private sector, criminalization of the promise of mediation in bribery, the questions of criminal liability for illegal enrichment, recognition of non-material benefits as a bribe, etc. remain unsolved. It is emphasized in the article that differentiation of responsibility for small and "non-small" bribery neither reflects the character of public danger of this phenomenon nor builds up a correct idea about the essence and content of public relations taken under criminal legal protection. The above mentioned differentiation can deform the concepts of corruption (and forms of its manifestation) in the consciousness of the participants of public relations. The authors conclude that the changes in the criminal law have a contradictory ideological and legal character: there is "governmentalization" of the private sector on the standard (criminal and legal) level and a shift of accent from the relations in the sphere of public power to the relations under which the state participates as a subject of economic activity.

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