Law, State and Law
Amnesty for the Constitution Day. What articles fall under amnesty. The essence, term, procedure for application, acceptance and conditions of amnesty
In December 2013, the website of the "Rossiyskaya Gazeta" published a report on an amnesty for a wide range of people. In the same month, the entire country celebrated the day of the Constitution of the Russian Federation in 2013. The amnesty, timed to this significant event, was to be realized immediately after the publication of the document. The bill was passed by the President of the Russian Federation for discussion by the State Duma.
Who affected the amnesty
The essence of the amnesty is to pardon a number of persons who for some reason have the right to withdraw from custody. However, people who were eagerly awaiting the publication of the amnesty project were unpleasantly surprised to learn that the text of the document contains many ambiguities and limitations, because of which not all hopes will be justified.
In fact, the categories of the population that were supposed to fall under the amnesty were quite numerous. The first group of pardoned persons includes persons convicted for a period of less than five years, but who have not previously served a sentence in correctional facilities. This provision of the document applies to mothers of minor children, pregnant women, men who have reached the age of sixty, and women who have reached the age of fifty-five years, citizens who were victims of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster, first and second group invalids, as well as servicemen and any Other persons who took part in hostilities.
According to the draft amnesty, charges will also be taken against those who were not sentenced to imprisonment, probation or early release. Luck smiled and those criminals whose punishments are delayed or relaxed. The amnestied were to be citizens who committed offenses as minors. Among other things, the amnesty was promised to be declared for people convicted under such articles as hooliganism, violation of traffic rules and mass riots.
The "broad" amnesty also affected persons whose criminal cases were still at the stage of investigation or legal proceedings. All such cases, as well as charges for articles with a penalty of no more than five years, were annulled. This rule also applies to minors and accused under the first part of Article 264 of the Criminal Code (for violation of traffic rules). In this circle of people were included the above military and pregnant women.
Articles not amended for amnesty
For convicted more than a hundred articles, amnesty is not expected. They will stay in places of imprisonment sentenced for murder, causing serious or moderate harm to health. For a series of articles on sexual abuse, fraud, major looting and robbery, the amnesty was also not provided.
Amnesty on the day of the Constitution of the Russian Federation did not touch the so-called "economic" criminals convicted of the acts prescribed from articles 169 to 200. The first persons of the state explain this decision by the fact that the amnesty for economic crimes has already been held earlier. Then, in 2013, more than 1,400 people were released. However, citizens whose crimes constituted a threat to public security, such as terrorists , should not have left the places of deprivation of liberty.
Terms of entry into force
The drafting of the project was carried out by the Human Rights Council, which is under the President. On December 9 last year, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin issued an initial version of the document for further consideration. The chairman of the State Duma committee, responsible for issues of criminal law-making, Pavel Krasheninnikov, said that, most likely, the bill could be discussed and approved not earlier than December 17. The text of the document says that the amnesty expires for the next six months after the official resolution is published.
Acceptance of amnesty and initial public reaction
When the official website of the President of the Russian Federation posted news about the upcoming amnesty, a note was attached to this message explaining some of the provisions of the draft. From the note it followed that the amnesty on the day of the Russian Constitution extends to a limited number of persons who are called the least socially protected. In other words, special categories of the population were promised pardon: some convicted, accused, suspected and under investigation, as well as citizens who had special merits before their homeland.
Vice Speaker of the State Duma, representative of the United Russia faction, Vladimir Vasiliev, explained to news agencies that an amnesty of prisoners will affect about twenty-five thousand people. According to the statements of the deputies, they found the text of the resolution on Tuesday morning in Rossiyskaya Gazeta. Nevertheless, the necessary information did not appear on the website of the State Duma, nor on the Kremlin's network resources. It was known for certain that the president was going to "pardon" a much broader circle of people than was stated in the explanatory note. Either way, the public from the very beginning met the news of the amnesty with a stormy and controversial discussion.
The ill-fated third point
In the draft resolution, the most interesting was the third paragraph, it says about the amnesty for categories not only "beneficiaries", but also for those already convicted. The articles mentioned in the third paragraph of the resolution have already been mentioned above. This is hooliganism, violation of traffic rules, which did not lead to death, as well as participation or organization of mass riots.
In this regard, the president's meeting with Mikhail Fedotov, the chairman of the HRO, is recalled. Then Vladimir Vladimirovich commented on the various features of the jubilee amnesty, saying that it can only apply to individuals who did not actually commit serious crimes, did not commit any violent actions against the authorities. According to the government, there are no weighty grounds for releasing socially dangerous individuals to freedom.
The Human Rights Council worked on the text of the document for about three months. During this time, the council members insisted on expanding the circle of those who were amnestied. Initially, the discussion narrowed the circle of those released only to "criminals". However, at the very last moment V.V. Putin somewhat changed his position and introduced the very third clause in the draft resolution, which implied an amnesty for political criminals.
It should immediately exclude erroneous or incorrect reading, because the document was endorsed in the state legal department of the president. He was also assured by the first deputy head of the administration, it is likely that the head himself. Therefore, the publication of the note before the introduction of the main text is explained by some confusion and insufficient preparation for such a course of events in the presidential apparatus and its coordinating structures. Confirmation of this hypothesis can be an unusual stylistics, in which the third item is framed. The legal component is significantly different from the one that is traced in the rest of the document. In the following paragraphs there was no mention that an amnesty on the day of the Constitution should affect those persons whose cases are only considered, which in practice is an exceptional case.
There was still the possibility that the third paragraph would eventually be deleted from the ruling. But such a statement of the question would certainly stir up excitement and provoke a public scandal that blew up all sections of the population. That is why, in the final "clean" version, not only criminal criminals were pardoned.
Amnesty for "stars"
It's no secret that the amnesty of the prisoners was not just "entered the masses." It has become a symbol of the struggle for freedom for political prisoners, the struggle waged by liberal activists and representatives of independent media for a long time.
The phenomenon, nicknamed "Putin's arbitrariness" among the people and consisting in mass accusations of persons conducting oppositional anti-government activities, probably did not exist at all, it was fictitious and far-fetched. After all, the amnesty of 2013-2014 clearly shows that the authorities are capable of dialogue with the population. Despite the fact that opinions about the reasons for such sudden mercy were divided, the fact that the amnesty was held surprisingly in time, as they say, "for the day's ills" is incontrovertible. Out of the custody came those whose release under the amnesty seemed an unrealizable dream: feminists from Pussy Riot, activists of Greenpeace, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, part of the figurants of the Swamp business. The accusations were also dropped from Anatoly Serdyukov.
Even during the amendment, lawyers noted a sea of opportunities for removing all penalties from their wards. So, Mikhail Kreindlin, who defended the rights of the crew of the "Arctic Sunrise", explained that the amendments adopted in the second reading predetermined the release of a certain number of persons to freedom, for example, convicts for hooliganism. These were the curious "Greenpeace". The amendment was adopted and still included in the document in the third reading. That's why 30 activists of Greenpeace along with the crew were amnestied long before the trial.
As far as everyone knows, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alekhina were under investigation and were sentenced under the same article. The bill found its enforcement against the girls, and they managed to return home a few months before the end of the prescribed period.
It should be noted that not all "swamps" were provided with amnesty. Only ten persons involved in the riots were to be released from correctional institutions, only from ten were officially dropped all charges. The State Duma Committee on Procedural, Criminal, Civil and Arbitration Legislation resolutely rejected the amendment on amnesty of persons accused of using violence against power representatives and organizing riots. In the absence of such an item, 17 activists of the Marshland case were not pardoned.
The list of citizens, whose amnesty was not announced, is wide enough. Many cases received a wide public response. Vladimir Akimenkov, Maria Baronova, Artem Savelov, Dmitry Rukavishnikov, Nikolai Kavkazsky, Fedor Bakhov, Leonid Kovin, Anastasia Rybachenko, Oleg Arkhipenkov, Stepan Zimin, Maxim Luzyanin, Alexandra Dukhanina, Yaroslav Belousov, Denis Lutskevich, Alexander Margolip, Alexei Polyhovich, Andrey Barabanov , Sergei Krivov, Ilya Gushchin, Richard Sobolev, Alexei Gaskarov, Mikhail Kosenko, Konstantin Lebedev and Sergei Udaltsov should not and will not be amnestied.
The challenge to civil society, or Amnesty for the "Cause 12"
Many called the amnesty project the most real challenge to civil society. To become amnestied, prisoners must remain without protection. The published resolution caused a flurry of indignation among lawyers and other persons involved in legal activities. Half the trouble was that freedom was not given at all to the broad masses to whom it was promised, but to a much smaller portion of the population. A much more serious problem turned out to be hardware-legal equipment, which was performed so masterfully that the law left a lot of paradoxes, traps and duality.
First of all, only those who refused to protect their rights could get a chance to be released. After all, in the context of Russian record keeping, the legal defense of defendants and defendants takes quite some time, and the amnesty is limited to six months. All potential and sentenced criminals had to make a choice: either forget about professional protection altogether, or hope for a "blessing of heaven" and wait for an early court verdict. The trick is that the verdict will be carried out in any case, but it would be very difficult to meet the amnesty deadline. So you are thinking about the sincerity of such charity on the part of the government.
But a particularly severe and insurmountable obstacle was the amnesty decree for the defendants of the well-known "Cause of the Twelve." Do not forget that they all had one common grief, one common "legal trap". But the status of all the accused had different. Of course, it was beneficial for the participants in the riots to speed up the process and to meet the investigation in order to await probable release. Accused of violence against representatives of law enforcement structures in turn were forced to desperately, with redoubled force to defend themselves. Perhaps they would have to appeal to higher authorities, but such a line of behavior literally contradicted and prevented their "friends in misfortune" from escaping criminal punishment.
Opinions of professionals. The main shortcomings of amnesty
Russian human rights activists and well-known lawyers for a long time commented on the decision of the authorities and ruthlessly criticized certain provisions of the resolution and the application of amnesty as such.
For some, as for the lawyer Maria Baronova, the situation has become even more incomprehensible and questionable than it was before. She stressed the unconventional nature of the amnesty of 2013, mentioning that all previous "pardons" were not tied to specific stages of the investigation or trial. The jubilee amnesty unobtrusively "chose" the lucky ones whom it touches. A strange formulation that only convicts will be amnestied aroused bewilderment both among specialists and the general public.
The procedure for applying the amnesty to Dmitry Agranovsky, who saw in her as an attempt to interfere with the proceedings, was not pleasant, as the accused under articles 212 and 230 need to become convicted and listen to a conviction. And the terms were not at all acceptable and reasonable, they could hardly have been enough to pass judgment. According to the lawyer, such a statement of the issue exerts some pressure on the participants in the process, he hardly remembered cases when the public observed such strange conditions for amnesty. Dmitry expressed the hope that a corresponding amendment would be made to this paragraph of the draft resolution, otherwise it would look unworthy for our state.
Sergei Davidis as the organizer of the procession held on May 6 notes positive changes in the policy of the Russian authorities, but joined the opinion of his colleagues "in the shop," noting that the amnesty was somewhat poorer and less unpretentious than the public expected. The easiest way was to release women and children, although it is obvious to all that prisoners are mostly adult men, many of whom sit for unproven crimes, incriminated by them for reasons that are not understandable to anyone.
What do competent officials say about this?
In December, throughout the country, there were civil-educational and patriotic events, we celebrated the day of the Constitution of the Russian Federation-2013. Amnesty was liked by very few people, but not only independent and opposition experts acted with criticism, but also people holding high positions in various large organizations.
The chairman of the Helsinki Group in Moscow, Lyudmila Alekseeva, expressed fears that, as is often the case with Russian legislation, at the last moment unpredictable changes will be made to the undesirable side, and not many prisoners will leave the places of imprisonment, as planned and advertised earlier .
The Human Rights Council tried to refute this information. Andrei Babushkin made an official statement, arguing that the published project has little in common with what the Council drafted and formalized. He also confirmed the "pseudo-discretion" of the amnesty, because according to that draft resolution, fewer than 1,500 people could come to freedom, as many would be released from custody. Such figures were called FSIN of the Russian Federation, listing how many women, children and petty offenders should be amnestied. In fact, the promised amnesty would not be able to solve any of the tasks set: to reduce the number of prisoners in prisons, to reunite broken families, to correct excessively punitive statistics and various prison mistakes. But Babushkin acknowledged that there are similarities between the two versions of the project: they both included items prescribing articles for an amnesty, according to which the defendants should be released under articles on mass riots and "swamps".
Valery Borshchev, who is in the Moscow City Monitoring Committee, expressed regret that the defendants in police resistance and violent actions against them will not be amnestied. He maintains the position that most of the accusations in these cases are unsubstantiated.
Henry Reznik, the representative and chairman of the Chamber of Advocates, explained this decision by the authorities with the desire to preserve their political face and restore the reputation that has been so badly damaged after conflicts, rallies and high-profile proceedings with Pussy Riot, those involved in the Swamp business and others.
In one way or another, practically all public figures and jurists agreed that the amnesty on the day of the Constitution was not at all pure, transparent and "for the people". Many called these state measures "showy", and people who are not related to the legislative, executive or judicial and power structures, did not at all attach an amnesty to some overvaluation, reacted skeptically to the project and, as we have done, with disbelief. However, the very act of amnesty can be considered quite successfully implemented, because many publicity scandals as a result were finally resolved by such a "conciliatory" way with the authorities.
Did they believe in the West?
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