DOI: 10.7256/2454-0692.2022.4.37672

Abstract: The article is devoted to the problem of legal definition of the concepts of close relatives, close persons and family members of a citizen. Inconsistencies between the norms of the Constitution of the Russian Federation and the norms of family legislation in relation to the criminal procedural category "close relatives", which ensures the provision of witness immunity in criminal proceedings. It discusses controversial issues about the circle of close relatives who have the right not to testify as witnesses. The essence of this socio-legal status is revealed, the circle of persons forming it is established, the positive and negative sides of the existing definitions and formulations of "close relatives" are considered.The scientific novelty lies, first of all, in the fact that in the presented article the norms of criminal procedure, civil and family law regulating relations of kinship, matrimony, as well as the procedure and problems of their application in criminal proceedings were considered. Paragraph 4 of Article 5 of the Criminal Procedure Code of the Russian Federation refers to spouses as close relatives, but Article 14 of the Family Code of the Russian Federation does not consider them as such. The analysis of family law allows us to conclude that kinship is possible only by "blood" (the exception is the institution of adoption). For this reason, spouses cannot be close relatives and they are in a marital relationship to each other. The proposals on amendments and additions to the Criminal Procedure Code of the Russian Federation are formulated, which will improve the domestic criminal procedure legislation within the framework of developing a unified approach to the content of the definition of "close relatives".

DOI: 10.7256/2454-0692.2022.3.37665

Abstract: The subject of the study are criminal law norms prescribing responsibility for inciting hatred and enmity, laws and other regulations related to this topic, the state and dynamics of crime, as well as trends in improving the criminal law in this area. The authors consider in detail scientific approaches to understanding a person as an object of criminal law protection. The methodological basis of the research was the general scientific methods of cognition dialectical, reflecting the connection of theory and practice, logical, historical, empirical and system-structural, general logical methods induction, deduction, analysis, synthesis, private scientific methods, sociological, modeling, statistical and others. Special attention is paid to the problem of improving the criminal-legal qualification of crimes against the person motivated by racial, national or religious hatred or enmity, or motivated by hatred or enmity against any social group. The paper presents the author's position on the improvement of criminal law norms (Part 2 of Articles 131, 132 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation). The main approaches in this work can be used in law-making activities to improve the current criminal legislation, law enforcement activities of judicial and law enforcement agencies in order to resolve problematic situations in the qualification of crimes motivated by political, ideological, racial, national or religious hatred or enmity or hatred or enmity against any social group.