Application of Conditional and Early Release From Serving a Punishment in the Republic of Kazakhstan: Collisions of the Constitution and Criminal Law

This study is devoted to the problems of inconsistency and contradictions that exist between the provisions of the Constitution of the Republic of Kazakhstan, international legal acts of the UN in the field of treatment of convicted persons and national criminal legislation in terms of the tools for using the institution of parole from serving a sentence. It is rightly stated that this institution is one of the means of criminal law encouragement and stimulation of socially acceptable behavior of convicts, contributing to the achievement of the goals of punishment. In this regard, certain aspects of the normative design of parole in the current Criminal Code of the Republic of Kazakhstan and in the Criminal Code of the Republic of Kazakhstan of 1997 are touched upon. The author of the study focuses on the application of parole to persons serving a sentence of life imprisonment. In connection with this, the key subject of the study was to assess the validity of such a legal restriction as deprivation of the right to parole of convicts who had previously been sentenced to death by pardon and were replaced by life imprisonment. Based on this, the study examines the features of the content of the death penalty and highlights the prerequisites for excluding this punishment from the national legislation of the Republic of Kazakhstan. The author rightly points out that such a humane manifestation of the criminal policy of the Kazakh state is contradicted by the preservation in the criminal legislation of the Republic of Kazakhstan of the legal impossibility of parole for convicts who have become recipients of life imprisonment as a replacement for the death penalty. Analyzing this issue, the author comes to the conclusion that it is unconstitutional to deprive convicts of the right to parole for whom life imprisonment was the result of replacing the death penalty. Along with this, the inconsistency of this legal restriction with international human rights standards is shown and the need to overcome such a conflict of criminal law is substantiated.