Guidelines for the Criminal Law Assessment of Actions Constituting Violent and Armed Hooliganism Need to be Adjusted

The legislative expansion of the range of actions constituting hooliganism under criminal law in 2020 actualized issues related to determining the amount of harm constituting «violence» and admissibility of maintaining an expansive interpretation of the «armed» attribute given by the Plenum of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation in relation to the previous version of Art. 213 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. Given the severity of the sanctions of the norms on crimes against the person out of hooligan motives and hooliganism, the author classifies beatings and minor harm to health as violence. The paper proposes to limit mental violence in hooliganism with threats of murder or grievous bodily harm; arguments are made to change the approach to qualifying actions related to the use of violence that is not dangerous to life and health, in the process of resisting a representative of the authorities. The consolidation of violence among alternative mandatory elements of hooliganism and the transfer of armament to a qualified composition require a change in the law enforcement approach to determining armament by excluding the use of weapons in the process of hooliganism beyond the destruction of a living target, as well as promoting unsuitable, unloaded and fake weapons. Maintaining an expansive interpretation of this objective feature levels, in the author’s opinion, the differences between crime-forming and crime-differentiating elements of the composition of hooliganism. Significant changes to Art. 213 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation and rules establishing responsibility for related corpus delicti objectify the need to adopt a new interpretive act.

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