Criminal Law Counteraction to Hooliganism in View of Changes to Legislation

Abstract

The latest edition of the norm on criminal liability for hooliganism has been in force for two years. It is now necessary to assess the criminological situation of counterac­ting this crime and the practice of enforcing Art. 213 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. In order to conduct this assessment, the authors monitored the enforcement of the abovementioned Article and studied 100 publicly available verdicts that were issued by the courts of the Russian Federation for the crimes committed after January 10, 2021. The monitoring was carried out in November–December 2022 using continuous sampling. The study of official statistics showed that there are positive changes in counteracting criminally punishable hooliganism. The express analysis of the results of monitoring court verdicts allowed the authors to identify a number of interesting regularities in the dynamics of criminological indices of hooliganism. The criminal law research of court verdicts showed that, after Art. 213 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation was amended at the end of 2020, the old law enforcement problems (qualifying an action as a gross violation of public order, identifying the motive for hooliganism) were aggravated by the new ones (establishing the features of armed hooliganism, qualification of hooliganism in conjunctions with crimes against a person). Since the goal of the monitoring consisted in uncovering the contradictions in law enforcement, the authors limited themselves to identifying the problems and, in this connection, drew the attention to the necessity of special clarifications from the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation.