Criminal Law Sanctions and the Practice of Their Implementation in Counteracting Some Crimes of Corruption

Abstract

When analyzing the problem of counteracting crimes with a corruption component, specialists single out different areas: criminological, victimological, criminal prevention, organizational-management, etc. The authors of the article focus on such criminal law area as the application of criminal law sanctions and their effectiveness in counteracting some most common types of crimes of corruption. This topic is of much interest because the introduction of amendments into criminal legislation in 2003–2011 and later years that eliminated the minimum punishment of incarceration or fine for a considerable number of norms, the lack of coordination between specific types of punishment, and a number of other factors created conditions for a rather wide and often unjustified use of judicial discretion when determining punishment for crimes of corruption, which led both the research community and the practicing lawyers to believe that the criminal law itself contains a corruption component. The abovementioned factors, together with the task of liberalizing criminal legislation on economic crimes set by the country’s leadership, demand a simultaneous improvement of the effectiveness of criminal law measures used for the category of unlawful actions under discussion. Taking into consideration the analysis of criminal law sanctions for specific types of crimes of corruption, the existing court practice of awarding criminal sentences for them, and the statistical data of the Court Department of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, it is necessary to draw attention of court authorities and lawmakers to the existing problems both in the legislative content of criminal law sanctions and in their implementation; their essence is outlined in the current article. The choice of the types of crimes of corruption, the criminal law sanctions for which are analyzed in the article, is not accidental and is justified by their prevalence in the practice of law enforcement.