Amnesty and Pardon: Legal Nature and Problems of Improving Their Legal Regulation

Amnesty and pardon are often seen as special forms of state encouragement for individuals who have previously committed offenses. This nature of theirs cannot be considered accurate. Each of them has its own, but sometimes coinciding in procedural status, addressees and official subjects, and are reflected in the relevant legal acts. There is no single approach in the doctrine to defining the normative nature and sectoral affiliation of the institutions of amnesty and pardon. This paper attempts to justify their complex (intersectoral) nature, while the basis of the legal regulation of amnesty and pardon is formed by the norms of constitutional (state) law, the provisions of which are concretized in the norms of criminal, administrative and criminal procedure law, taking into account the specifics of their subject matter. Based on the analysis of the norms of the Constitution of the Russian Federation regulating amnesty and pardon, the following conclusions have been formulated. The constitutional and legal regulation of amnesty cannot be recognized as legally correct, since the declaration of amnesty by the State Duma through a resolution involves the withdrawal of federal laws from effect. The decrees of the President of Russia on pardon are considered by the authors as acts of legal application, relying on the relevant provisions of the Constitution, taking into account the prescriptions of sectoral norms that do not allow these acts to violate the fundamental rights and freedoms of individuals and citizens in terms of choosing specific forms (methods) of pardon.