Distinguishing Between Crimes and Administrative Offenses Committed During Protest Actions

Abstract

The paper describes the mechanism of implementing the preventive function of protective legal norms, which, being a relatively independent phenomenon, is not isolated from the systematizing influence of regulative legal norms. Regulation and prevention together form an integrated complex of measures of legal influence on public relations. However, the protective norms of administrative-tort and criminal law are «secondary», they are derived from the clauses of regulative law, follow them strictly, and support their systematizing potential. The mechanism of using the preventive potential of protective norms has a linear option and a sequential one, depending on the degree of public danger of an illegal action, the criminological data on the cumulative effect of the damage inflicted and the growing anti-social activity of the perpetrator. The condition for the effective use of the preventive potential of protective legal norms to prevent demonstration-protest crimes lies in applying measures of administrative law and criminal law liability together in a consistent manner, and duly coordinating them with the prescriptions of regulatory legislation. The legal reaction of the state to the threats that objectively arise when the citizens of the Russian Federation exercise their right to the freedom of assembly and speech immediately depends on the type and content of these threats, and logically leads to the discussion of the situations when the state can use criminal law measures to react to the threats and the situations when the administrative-tort measures are sufficient. In more general terms, this is an issue of distinguishing between crimes and administrative offences, which arises both at the stage of establishing responsibility, and the stage of its implementation.