Discriminatory Motives and Establishment thereof in the Subjective Side of Unreasonable Refusal to Hire a Person or Dismissal of an Employee (Articles 144.1 and 145 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation)

Abstract

One of the urgent problems in the Russian labor market is discrimination against job applicants and employees. In order to deal with this phenomenon, the state establishes various liability measures for employers, including criminal ones, for unreasonable refusal to hire or dismissal because a person has reached retirement age, a woman is pregnant or has children under the age of three years. A key role for the criminal legal classification of these crimes belongs to the specific motive of the employer, which is difficult to establish in practice, encouraging them to violate the equality of the right of a person and a citizen to work, depending on their age, pregnancy or children under the age of three years that a woman has. The paper aims to сonsider problematic issues related to the establishment of the motives of the subjects of crimes provided for in Articles 144.1 and 145 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, and to give recommendations as to solve them. The tasks are to investigate the motive as a crime-forming sign of the offenses provided for in Articles 144.1 and 145 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, and to identify the problems of its establishment in law enforcement practice using the methods of description, analysis and synthesis, generalization, comparison, system-structural and formal logical. The study notes that the difficulties in establishing the discriminatory motives of employers to commit crimes under Articles 144.1 and 145 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation are due to the veiling of those under legal motives, the easy concealment of evidence of one’s guilt, as well as a defect in the legislative description. The author proposes recommendations for effective establishment and substantiation of the discriminatory motives of subjects in the offenses provided for in Articles 144.1 and 145 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, as well as eliminating a legislative defect in their description.