On some technical and legal problems of the Russian Criminal Code

Since the adoption of the new Criminal Code of the Russian Federation in 1996, there has been an ongoing debate in the legal science about its structure, sections, chapters and individual articles. The Russian scientific school has made a serious contribution to the development of legal technology in criminal law. Many comments that resulted from the analysis of legal norms were taken into account by the legislator, but the ongoing modification of the criminal law of our country does not cause optimism among scientists. The transformation of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation is the result of criminal law policy, which today, unfortunately, is not without flaws. The defects of the legislative technology of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation are of a complex nature, originate in the conceptual approaches of the legislator (or in their internal inconsistency) and are manifested in detail in individual articles of the Criminal Code. We do not set a goal either to identify the nature of defects or to classify them, which in itself requires a more extensive study. However, some essentially typical technical and legal problems of criminal law are given. Attention is drawn to the inconsistency of sanctions, unclear mechanisms for their imposing, incorrect construction of dispositions, artificial creation of difficulties for law enforcement officer and judges, problems of understanding evaluative signs, and illogical use of function words (conjunctions). The article concludes that it is necessary to improve the legislative technology.