«Simple» Criminal Law Measures to Combat Organized Crime and Consequences of their Application

Effective criminal law measures to counter organized crime should be based on an adequate understanding of this phenomenon and should comply With the principles, approaches and traditions of the national legal system. The disposition of the article 210.1 «Occupying the highest position in the criminal hierarchy» introduced in the Special Part of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation is excessively concise and does not correspond to the fundamental principle of legal certainty of criminal law norms. Despite the declared successes in its application, the practice of judicial review of criminal cases of crimes is ambiguous. In addition, the conviction of a «thief-in-law» («criminal lord») and his incarceration does not deprive him of either a criminal «title» or real power in the criminal world. The low effectiveness of criminal law measures is explained by the fact that the «thieves’ world» and its criminal hierarchy headed by «thieves-in-law» are neither a criminal community (criminal organization), nor an organized group or any other form of complicity listed in Article 35 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. It is proposed, having eliminated terminological redundancy, to call it a criminal community, in contrast to the forms of complicity provided for in Part 4 of Article 35 and Article 210 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation that are more correctly called criminal organizations. The paper defines a criminal community in its new understanding, and proposes a set of criminalized acts to effectively counter this phenomenon.

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