Is It Necessary to Restore the Educational and Preventive Tasks of Criminal Justice in the Criminal Procedure Code of the Russian Federation?
Authors:   Ural State Law University, Azarenok Nikolay V. 
Published: March 2022

The aim of the article is to resolve the issue of the need to restore the educational and preventive tasks of criminal justice in the Criminal Procedure Code of the Russian Federation. In accordance with this aim, using the comparative legal method, the author considers the normative legal regulation of the designated provisions in the previous Code of Criminal Procedure of the RSFSR of 1960, which contained these requirements in Article 2. Based on the legal analysis, the author states that the Soviet legislator managed to create an effective criminal procedure mechanism that ensures the implementation of the provisions of Article 2 of the 1960 Criminal Procedure Code of the RSFSR in terms of educational and preventive requirements. Therefore, later, it should have been taken as a basis for the development of the Code of Criminal Procedure of the Russian Federation. The formal legal analysis of the current Code of Criminal Procedure allows concluding that the legislator refused to define the requirements, fixing the purpose of criminal proceedings in Article 6. However, in other provisions of the Code (Part 4 of Article 29, Part 2 of Article 73, Part 2 of Article 158), as well as in the practice of its application, they are still valid. In addition, the analysis of other domestic procedural codes indicates the presence of educational and preventive tasks in them. The author notes that the absence of these requirements in the Code of Criminal Procedure of the Russian Federation is one of its significant methodological omissions. Moreover, the Code regulates criminal procedure activities, in which the public interest has always been dominant. Meanwhile, the task of preventing crimes is also included in the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (Article 2) and the Penal Code of the Russian Federation (Article 1). Based on the comparative legal and formal legal analysis of criminal procedure and other legislation, the author proposes the following solution. The law in general has an educational function; therefore, with the help of the functions of the law and its tasks, any socially significant form of human practice is regulated. The author argues that functions and tasks are different phenomena and they cannot be identified; thus, these categories are not directly dependent on each other. Functions define specific types of work, groups of performers, and their responsibilities. Tasks, on the other hand, limit the employee's arbitrary use of the rights granted to them to specific requirements that the employee should strive to meet. As a result of the study, the author comes to the conclusion that the establishment of the causes and conditions that contributed to the commission of the crime and the adoption of measures to eliminate them do not directly follow from the functional purpose of state bodies in the field of criminal justice. In this connection, these provisions should be separately defined as the tasks these bodies face. On the basis of the above, the author's definition of educational and preventive tasks of domestic criminal justice is proposed.