Confiscation of property as a punishment under the Criminal Code of the Republic of Abkhazia and issues of its application

The article is dedicated to a comparative legal analysis of the confiscation of property as a criminal law measure under the legislation of the Republic of Abkhazia and the Russian Federation. The subject of the study is the normative provisions enshrined in Article 49 of the Criminal Code of the Republic of Abkhazia, Article 44 (system of punishments) of the Criminal Code of the Republic of Abkhazia, as well as Chapter 15.1 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. The work analyzes the legal nature of confiscation, the grounds and the range of crimes leading to confiscation, the peculiarities of enforcement against the property of third parties, as well as the existence of a list of property not subject to confiscation. Special attention is given to the explanations of the Plenum of the Supreme Court of the Republic of Abkhazia and their differences from the positions of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation. The study covers the historical evolution of confiscation in the post-Soviet space, including the 2006 reform in Russia, from which the legislation of the Republic of Abkhazia has currently distanced itself. The methodological basis consists of comparative legal analysis, formal-legal method, systematic interpretation of criminal law norms, as well as analysis of acts of judicial interpretation. The scientific novelty of the research lies in the fact that a detailed comparative legal analysis of the confiscation of property in the Republic of Abkhazia and the Russian Federation has been conducted for the first time at a monographic level, focusing on the different legal nature of this institution. The author has established that, despite the common historical origins, the legislators of the two countries have chosen fundamentally different paths: Russia excluded confiscation from the system of punishments in 2006, classifying it as other measures of a criminal law nature, while Abkhazia retained the traditional punitive model, enshrining confiscation as an additional punishment. Substantive differences have also been identified: in the Criminal Code of the Republic of Abkhazia, confiscation is applied only for serious and especially serious property crimes and only against the perpetrator himself, whereas in the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, it applies to a broader range of acts and may extend to the property of third parties. A unique feature of the Abkhaz model is the existence of an extensive list of property not subject to confiscation in the appendix to the Criminal Code of the Republic of Abkhazia. Proposals for improving the Criminal Code of the Republic of Abkhazia are substantiated.