Criminal Associations: Insights into the Concept, Types, and Challenges for Legislative Improvements to Combat Them

This article suggests improvements to the criminal law measures against organized crime. The terminology and conceptual framework of criminal groups were analyzed using various methods, such as dialectical, comparative-legal, system-structural, and formal-legal.The study exposed serious flaws in the current legislative approach to regulating criminal liability for arranging or leading criminal groups and participating in their activities. The main problem is that the same objective indicators of a criminal act are often referred to by different terms, resulting in misinterpretations of their etymological meanings in the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. In order to simplify the terminology, it was proposed to adopt the term “criminal associations” as a single label for all criminal groups. The opinions on removing criminal associations from the institution of complicity in crime were critically reviewed.