The State Duma in the second and third readings adopted a bill according to which the status of an employee of the internal affairs bodies will no longer be considered an aggravating circumstance in sentencing. The relevant information is published on the website of the lower house of parliament.
The adopted bill proposes to recognize as invalid paragraph «o» of Article 63 of the Criminal Code — «Commission of an intentional crime by an employee of the internal affairs body.» This will entail a change in judicial practice: crimes committed by representatives of internal affairs bodies will be assessed in the same way as crimes committed by ordinary citizens. As a result, the security forces will be able to impose less severe punishments for crimes than was previously accepted.
Item «o» was introduced into Article 63 of the Criminal Code in 2010. According to the authors of the bill, it contributes to «discrimination against employees of internal affairs bodies in comparison with employees of other state structures classified as law enforcement agencies.»
“In addition to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, law and order in Russia is also provided by employees of the courts, the prosecutor’s office, the FSB, the FSO, the National Guard, the Federal Penitentiary Service, the military police, customs, etc. The offender’s belonging to these structures is not an aggravating circumstance, which is clearly unfair,” the text said. explanatory note. At the same time, in 2011, the Constitutional Court ruled that this norm of the Criminal Code does not in any way violate the principle of equality of all before the law.
As Petr Khromov, senior lawyer at the Team Against Torture, noted, the real purpose of the bill is to create preferences for security officials . “As our organization noted earlier, even now police officers are often given suspended sentences. If the bill is adopted, then, in conjunction with other initiatives, it will obviously affect the number of sentences with real imprisonment for employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs,” he told Advokatskaya Street.
The bill itself was submitted to the State Duma in October 2022 . It was adopted in the first reading on February 28, 2023.