Criminal-Legal Means of Counterterrorism Need to be Improved

摘要

The work aim is to assess the anti-terrorist component of the Russian criminal legislation from the position of its suitability for countering modern terrorism, and above all its manifestations such as a terrorist act and an act of international terrorism. The research relevance is determined by the exceptional danger and scale of terrorism, the number of their human victims, changes in the qualitative parameters of criminological manifestations of terrorism and the need to find effective countering means this part of criminality. The general characteristic of terrorism crimes is given, the legislative constructions fixed in articles 205 and 361 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation are studied and estimated. Many general scientific methods of creative search, statistical techniques, as well as traditional methods of legal science were used to achieve the research goal. The work results are to identify the main failures of the regulation of the relevant legal norms and identify possible ways to overcome such defects. The connection between the unjustified complication of the legislative model of a terrorist act and the difficulties experienced by law enforcers in interpreting article 205 of the Criminal Code is shown. The author proves the inconsistency of the exclusion from the number of purposes of a terrorist act of the population intimidation and the insufficiency of the use for differentiation of responsibility for this crime, as well as the act of international terrorism of certain qualifying features. Proposals were made to improve the criminal-legal means of responding to the studied crimes, including recommendations to the legislator to clarify the normative description of the signs of terrorist crimes, to simplify the normative models of acts of terrorism, to optimize the differentiation of criminal liability for terrorism.