Proceedings Improvement of the Criminal Legal Regulation of the

Age of Criminal Responsibility in the Russian Federation

Alexander Mikhailovich Smirnov

Research Institute of the Federal Penitentiary Service of Russia, Moscow, Russia

Keywords: The subject of the crime, the age of criminal responsibility, insanity, mental retardation, acceleration,

advancing mental development, advancing intellectual development.

Abstract: The purpose of this article is to develop proposals for improving the Russian criminal law in the direction of

regulating criminal prosecution. An analysis of the Russian criminal law allows us to conclude that it treats persons

who have committed social acts as a minor in a very humane manner. The objectives of this study were to conduct

a comparative analysis of the age of criminal prosecution in some foreign countries, to study the circumstances that

make it possible to reduce and increase this age relative to the actual one due to mental and intellectual development.

The research results were obtained through the application of such methods of scientific knowledge as analysis and

synthesis, induction, study of scientific literature and expert assessments. In accordance with the requirements of

the legislation established by law, in accordance with the requirements of the legislation provided for by the

legislation, in accordance with the requirements for criminal liability. In addition, it is recommended to revise the

state nature of the response to juvenile delinquents, based on an extremely humane attitude towards them. All of this

will ensure greater fairness in the national criminal policy.

1 INTRODUCTION

The age of prosecution is one of the important

components of such an element of the corpus delicti

as its subject.

The subject of the crime is, in fact, the main

element of the mechanism for committing a specific

criminal act. Through it, all the negative factors that

determine the development of crime and criminal

behavior of an individual are translated into objective

reality, being reflected in it in the form of achieving a

criminal result.

That is why the establishment of the achievement

of a person who committed a socially dangerous act

of this age is important for law enforcement practice

in the field of combating crime.

In this connection, the issue of the age of

prosecution has been and is being given a lot of

attention among the scientific community, and this

issue will never lose its relevance for improving the

fight against crime.

https:// orcid.org/0000-0003-4779-4971

2 MATERIALS AND METHODS

This article is devoted to an attempt to solve the

problem of improving the criminal law regulation of

the age of criminal responsibility in the Russian

Federation in the direction of increasing the

effectiveness of combating juvenile delinquency and,

in general, all criminality on the territory of our

country. The results and conclusions of this study

were obtained through the application of such

methods of scientific knowledge as analysis and

synthesis, induction, study of scientific literature and

expert assessments.

3 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

According to Part 1 of Art. 20 of the Criminal Code

of the Russian Federation, the general age for

bringing to criminal responsibility, and therefore

recognizing a person as a criminal later, is when he at

the time of committing a socially dangerous act is

sixteen years old.

362

Smirnov, A.

Proceedings Improvement of the Criminal Legal Regulation of the Age of Criminal Responsibility in the Russian Federation.

DOI: 10.5220/0010643000003152

In Proceedings of the VII International Scientiﬁc-Practical Conference “Criminal Law and Operative Search Activities: Problems of Legislation, Science and Practice” (CLOSA 2021), pages

362-366

ISBN: 978-989-758-532-6; ISSN: 2184-9854

Part 2 of this article contains a list of crimes or

their separate elements, for the commission of which

a person may be subjected to a state response at an

earlier age, which is fourteen years old.

The lowered age for criminal prosecution for

crimes or their individual elements, specified in Part

2 of Art. 20 of the Criminal Code of the Russian

Federation, due to the fact that they are committed

exclusively intentionally, i.e. purposefully and

deliberately, the nature and degree of their social

danger are so great and obvious in comparison with

other criminal acts that it is already possible to fully

realize the harmfulness of the consequences of their

commission at an earlier age. The presence of this

awareness is confirmed by the results of numerous

scientific studies and special examinations.

In addition, for the commission of a number of

criminal acts, it is possible to prosecute under the

Criminal Code of the Russian Federation only from

the age of eighteen due to the specialty of the subject

of their commission. For example, when committing

attacks on the interests of military service, the

commission of malfeasance.

Issues of the age before the state reaches which

committed criminal atrocities are justified, that is, the

achievement of that state of maturation of the human

individual, his intellectual development, life

experience, when he is fully capable of realizing his

actions, fully aware of their nature and social essence,

and foreseeing the consequences of his actions. acts,

in other words, to be a fully formed personality from

the point of view of the social environment, a lot of

scientific works of both domestic and foreign

scientists and specialists in various fields of

knowledge, including criminal law science, are

devoted. But in general, according to the just remark

of A. Vasilievsky, whatever the results of the research

of the scientific community, the issue of choosing a

certain minimum age, before which the state will

justify criminal atrocities committed on its territory

by malefactors, is exclusively criminal-political. That

is why in each country and in each historical period

this issue is resolved in its own way, based on the

existing ideological, political, social and economic

conditions (Vasilievsky, 2000).

For example, in some foreign countries, among

which there are quite a few developed states in a

civilized, legal and socio-economic respect, the

general age after reaching which criminal atrocities

committed by a person are not justified by public

authorities is much lower than in Russia. In particular,

in such foreign countries as Bangladesh, Brunei,

Gambia, Egypt, India, Jordan, Qatar, Cyprus, Kuwait,

Lebanon, Libya, Malawi, Maldives, Namibia,

Nigeria, Pakistan, Singapore, Syria, Thailand,

Tanzania, Uganda, Switzerland is seven years old;

Zambia, Indonesia, Kenya, Samoa – eight years;

Malta, Philippines, Ethiopia - nine years; Australia,

England, Cote d'Ivoire, Nicaragua, New Zealand,

Suriname, Tuvalu, Colorado in the USA – ten years;

Mauritius, Turkey – eleven years; Brazil, Venezuela,

Greece, Israel, Canada, Colombia, Netherlands, Peru,

San Marino, Oregon in the USA - twelve years;

Algeria, Burundi, Madagascar, Mali, Monaco, Niger,

Tunisia, Uzbekistan, France, New York states, New

Hampshire, Georgia, Illinois USA – thirteen years;

Austria, Azerbaijan, Albania, Armenia, Belarus,

Bulgaria, Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina,

Vietnam, Germany, Spain, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan,

Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Romania, Slovenia,

Tajikistan, Japan, Idaho states, California, New

Jersey, Texas, Utah USA - fourteen years; Poland,

Slovakia, New Hampshire, Texas USA – fifteen years

(Kapinus, 2008; Zhilina, 2019).

Based on the analysis of international legal

practice, it can be concluded that the Russian

Federation is very humane towards minors who have

caused significant, often irreparable harm to law-

abiding citizens, which is expressed in a fairly high

age limit for bringing them to criminal responsibility

(Zhunussov, 2018; Smirnov, 2020).

The development of science in support of a

humane attitude towards juvenile criminals has

achieved such results, thanks to which the

achievement of a certain age by a person in a

temporary equivalent has ceased to mean the

unambiguity of such an achievement. Currently, a

certain number of criteria have been established and

recognized, thanks to which the achievement of a

person's formal (passport) age can be adjusted

downward, and quite significantly.

This is recognized and normatively enshrined in

international legal practice. For example, the United

Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the

Administration of Juvenile Justice (the Beijing Rules)

recommend that states take into account such

significant factors as emotional, spiritual and

intellectual maturity when deciding the age of

criminal responsibility of minors (Rule 4.1).

Modern Russian studies distinguish the following

criteria for «adjusting» the formal (passport) age:

biological, social (civil) and psychological (mental)

ages of a person, the establishment of which together

changes the idea of the level of human development

and, accordingly, what age this development is at

actually matches.

In particular, it has been scientifically proven that

there are a sufficient number of people whose

Proceedings Improvement of the Criminal Legal Regulation of the Age of Criminal Responsibility in the Russian Federation

363

psychological development lags behind the formal

(passport) or biological development. In this case,

they talk about the so-called «mental retardation»,

which was introduced into scientific circulation by

G.Ye. Sukhareva (Sukhareva, 1959, 1965).

This delay presupposes such a state of the human

body when mental functions (memory, attention,

thinking, emotional-volitional sphere) lag behind in

their development the accepted psychological norms

for a given age.

As the researchers of the considered delay note, a

very extensive list of mental disorders falls under it.

In this connection, at present there is no single point

of view regarding the independence of this diagnosis.

To date, there is no clear diagnostic framework for

this delay (Stefanaki, 2020).

All this provides quite large opportunities for

establishing a delay in psychological development in

minors, which ultimately provides almost unlimited

arguments for releasing them from criminal liability

(Antar, 2019; Tretyakova, 2017).

The fact that in modern classifications of diseases,

such as ICD-10 and DSM-V, there is no such

«diagnosis» at all, and each country has an individual

approach to its establishment, indicates the unlimited

possibilities for making a «diagnosis» – mental

retardation. Guided by ICD-10, diagnoses ranging

from F 83 to F 89 are usually "adjusted" for it, i.e.

from mixed specific disorders of psychological

development, to unspecified disorders of

psychological development, as well as the diagnoses

specified in section F 90-F98 «Emotional and

behavioral disorders, usually onset in childhood and

adolescence» (from hyperkinetic disorders to other

emotional and behavioral disorders usually beginning

in childhood and adolescence) (Maryniv, 2019).

Being under the influence of active researchers of

the problem of mental retardation of minors, the

Russian legislator, when developing the Criminal

Code of the Russian Federation in its Art. 20

introduced h. 3, according to which, if a minor has

reached the age specified in hh. 1 and 2 of this article,

but due to a lag in mental development not associated

with a mental disorder, during the commission of a

socially dangerous act, he could not fully realize the

actual nature and social danger of his actions

(inaction) or direct them, he is not subject to criminal

liability.

This provision refers to the so-called. The

«psychological age» («age-related sanity» or «age-

related insanity») of the perpetrator, the establishment

of which affects the justification of the criminal

atrocity committed by him and, as a consequence, the

decision on whether or not to prosecute him.

In the legal literature «psychological age» refers

to various age periods of mental development, which,

in terms of their indicators, may or may not

correspond to the chronological age of the age groups

identified in science (Borovykh, 1993).

This indicates that their psychological age does

not correspond to their actual (formal) age, i.e.

psychologically they are much younger than they

really are. As a result, it is not difficult for a

sufficiently professional defense lawyer to establish a

mental retardation in his client with the help of a

special examination and to put before the court the

question of releasing him from criminal liability

(Andal, 2019; Zhunussov, 2018).

Thus, the Russian legislator in the issue of

establishing the age of criminal liability adheres

exclusively to humanistic positions, regulating in the

criminal law only the possibility of reducing this age,

which in itself is clearly unfair (Vestov, 2020).

At the same time, we live in a modern world that

is changing (renewed) almost daily. Modern scientific

and technological progress has become the reason

that today's minors, at a much earlier age, begin to

fully understand the nature and consequences of a

much wider range of acts committed by them or other

persons (Khisamova, 2019). Their worldview is much

richer, thought processes are much faster. They are

much more likely to socialize than minors in the 20th

century, and even more so faster than minors in the

19th century. and in earlier periods of development of

society and the state.

All this indicates that a certain part of modern

minors has accelerated mental (intellectual)

development, in other words, the so-called

«psychological (intellectual) acceleration», which

refers to the psychological (mental) criterion for

establishing the age of criminal prosecution.

It must be canceled that the first fixed

observations concerning the rate of human

development at a young age were made back in the

middle of the twentieth century. German scientist E.

Koch, who introduced the term «acceleration» into

scientific circulation in 1935. Currently, this trend

continues.

According to the well-known child psychologist,

laureate of the State Prize Viktoria Solomonovna

Yurkevich, by the age of four, the child discovers 50

% of those intellectual abilities that are destined to

manifest, by six – 70 %, and by eight – 90 %

(Yurkevich, 2018).

Modern techniques quite objectively assess the

level of both intellectual and creative abilities. People

with a level of ability above the norm – about 10 %.

This includes simply capable, and talented, and

CLOSA 2021 - VII INTERNATIONAL SCIENTIFIC-PRACTICAL CONFERENCE “CRIMINAL LAW AND OPERATIVE SEARCH

ACTIVITIES: PROBLEMS OF LEGISLATION, SCIENCE AND PRACTICE”

364

geniuses – all of them are distinguished by high

mental performance. The group with a very high level

of giftedness includes about 0.5% (Konopleva, 2021).

If a minor who has committed a socially

dangerous act is found to have accelerated mental

(intellectual) development, as a result of which he

was fully aware of the social danger and the nature of

his actions, and also to lead them, this circumstance

will clearly indicate that he has reached age criminal

prosecution, which will be very fair and correct.

Hence, the issue of ensuring the fairness of the

Russian criminal law and the balance of the state's

response to the criminal activity of citizens of

inclusion in Art. 20 of the Criminal Code of the

Russian Federation, part 4, which regulates the

conditions for increasing the age at which criminal

liability arises.

4 CONCLUSIONS

In connection with the foregoing, we consider it

appropriate to address the legislator to consider the issue

of including in Art. 20 of the Criminal Code of the

Russian Federation "The age at which criminal

responsibility occurs", the novel of the following content:

4. If a minor has not reached the age provided for

in the first or second parts of this article, but due to an

advance in mental development during the

commission of a socially dangerous act, he could

fully realize the actual nature and social danger of his

actions (inaction) or lead them, he is subject to

criminal responsibility.

In addition, I would like to note that modern

minors are far from those representatives of society,

on the study of the socio-psychological

characteristics of which the fundamental foundations

of criminology of juvenile delinquency were formed,

which have become stereotypes in the

implementation of work to prevent their criminal

behavior (Smirnov, 2019).

In this connection, in order to increase the

effectiveness of countering the unlawful and criminal

activity of minors and crime in general, it is necessary

to revise the approach to determining the content of

the nature of the state's response to juvenile

delinquents, based on an exclusively humane attitude

towards them.

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