Amendments have been made to the State Duma to exclude part of the violations of the Code of Administrative Offenses from the jurisdiction of law enforcement officers

A government bill on delimiting the powers of the police and control and supervisory authorities in terms of identifying and punishing businesses for administrative offenses has been submitted to the State Duma. At the first stage, 46 offenses of the Code of Administrative Offenses will be removed from the jurisdiction of the police – only specialized inspectors will deal with them. Another 151 compositions are still being analyzed – the list of articles of the code removed from the jurisdiction of the police is expected to be expanded by the second reading.

The government submitted to the State Duma bill, which excludes from the competence of the police the response to a number of administrative offenses of business. The amendments are being adopted to eliminate duplication of powers between the police and control and supervisory authorities – in pursuance of the president’s order to enshrine at the legislative level the rule that business inspections can be carried out only by relevant departments. As Kommersant previously wrote, the idea of ​​such a distinction was put forward by the Prosecutor General’s Office to limit the “gray” activity of the police (see “Kommersant” dated August 18). In September, the Ministry of Justice presented the corresponding draft amendments to the Code of Administrative Offenses (see “Kommersant” dated September 25), then it was finalized in the government and was sent to the State Legal Department of the President (see “Kommersant” dated October 27), which, according to Kommersant, approved the document without comments.

As follows from the explanatory note to the introduced draft, the police now have the right to initiate and consider cases under 663 administrative charges – of which 197 relate to violations of requirements, compliance with which is also monitored by other government agencies. So far, the amendments plan to exclude 46 violations of the Code of Administrative Offenses from the jurisdiction of the police: these are, in particular, violations in the areas of property protection, the environment, transport, finance, taxes, the securities market, as well as business activities. We are talking about violations of requirements controlled by relevant authorities, despite the fact that the powers to initiate cases are assigned to both the police and inspectors.

As the Ministry of Justice explained to Kommersant, now administrative cases under such articles will be initiated only by relevant departments in compliance with the requirements of the law on state control, based on a risk-based approach.

As a result, the administrative burden on business is expected to decrease. At the same time, it is envisaged to establish an extended, one-year statute of limitations for violations excluded from the competence of the police, for comprehensive consideration (since the initiation of a case is allowed only after a control event has been carried out).

The Ministry of Justice explains that whether the police retain the remaining offenses with duplication of powers (151 in total) will then be decided based on three criteria. Firstly, the police have tasks to ensure security in certain areas by virtue of law or presidential decree. On the one hand, this may limit the administrative powers of the police to their own control functions (for example, the Ministry of Internal Affairs is the controller in the areas of migration, traffic, trafficking in narcotic and psychotropic substances). On the other hand, a greater breadth of retained powers can be ensured by taking into account the threat of harm to the life and health of citizens as a result of a violation, as well as the need for an immediate response (taking into account the round-the-clock work schedule of the police and the obligation to quickly arrive at the scene of a violation) and the possibility application of “direct administrative coercive measures”.

As explained to Kommersant in the office of Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Grigorenko, now, according to the selected criteria (their expansion is not excluded), interested participants, including government agencies, are analyzing the remaining offenses. It is expected that by the second reading of the draft, the list of compounds that are excluded from the competence of the police will expand.

Ekaterina Avdeeva, head of the expert center on criminal legal policy of Business Russia, notes that the development of legislation is moving along the path of conducting inspections only for a certain category of risk: for this system to work, control must be carried out by the relevant departments.

“Now duplicative powers will be eliminated when both control authorities and the police come to the business,” she says. According to the vice-president for legal regulation of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, Alexander Varvarin, “business assesses the project positively.” A survey of this association showed that the opinion of the Ministry of Justice and business about which types of state control have developed the negative practice of duplicating powers generally coincides. The adoption of the bill, he believes, will help reduce the financial and administrative burden on business.

Evgenia Kryuchkova, Oleg Sapozhkov