PUNISHMENT FOR SLANDER
Authors:   Barnaul Law Institute of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia (Barnaul, Russian Federation), Plaksina Tatyana A. 
Published: December 2021

Federal Law No. 538-FZ of 30 December 2020 substantially tightened the sanctions of the libel article, which previously contained only fines and compulsory labour, by including com-pulsory labour, arrest and imprisonment in most of them. The explanatory memorandum to the bill explained the changes by the need to provide the court with the choice of fair punish-ment, without specifying this provision in detail. As part of the research described in the article, statistics for the Russian Federation for 2013-2020 were taken from the reports of the Judicial Department of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation to study the practice of punishment for defamation. The analysis showed that law enforcers used the potential of sanctions of Article 128-1 of the Criminal Code in their previous edition to a very limited extent. This was reflected in the high share of fines among penalties imposed, as well as in insignificant amounts of fines even for qualified and especially qualified types of libel, despite the fact that sanctions provide for high maxi-mum fine limits - from RUB 500,000 in part 1 of Article 128-1 of the Criminal Code to RUB 5 million in part 5. In particular, the share of fine among penalties imposed for simple libel was over 85%, and the average fine was equal in 2018 to RUB 11,500. - 11.5 thousand roubles, in 2019 - 13.7 thousand roubles, in 2020. - 16.3 thousand roubles. In 2018, the average fine for public libel (part 2, article 128-1 of the Criminal Code) was 19,500 rubles; in 2020 - 23,100 rubles. - The sanction allowed for a fine of up to 1 million roubles, while the sanction allowed for a fine of up to 1 million roubles. Moreover, over a quarter of those convicted for especially qualified defamation under part 5 of article 128-1 of the Criminal Code were sentenced to a fine of 5,000 rubles, i.e., one thousand times less than the maximum limit established by the sanction. Only in single cases of slander convictions, the fine exceeded 100 thousand rubles. The establishment of custodial sentences for qualified and especially qualified types of defamation seems excessive: a verbal crime against a person's honour and dignity does not require such a harsh criminal legal response. Moreover, the legislator has designed sanctions with too broad a framework, fraught with the risk of arbitrariness in sentencing and the for-mation of contradictory judicial practice (for example, under part 5 of article 128-1 of the RF Criminal Code, both a fine of 5 thousand rubles, and imprisonment for the period of 5 years can be imposed). The inclusion of arrest in the sanction cannot be considered justified, as this type of punishment has not been introduced yet. The optimum way to improve the sanctions for the part 2 to 5 parts of Article 128-1 of the Criminal Code of the RF would be to enhance them with correctional labour and restriction of freedom. These types of punishments corre-spond to the typical level of public danger of qualified and especially qualified types of slan-der and perpetrators of such deeds. Their inclusion in the sanctions would compensate for the disadvantages of the latter, related to the restrictions enshrined in the law on imposing com-pulsory works and large fines.