On the System of Legislation on Administrative Offences, Administrative Courts and Administrative Violation

The article deals with the issues of offences in the field of criminal and administrative law. The author draws attention to the fact that those types of legal proceedings (including criminal and administrative) which are proclaimed in Part 2 of Art. 118 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation are not equivalent from the procedural perspective. The Criminal Procedure Code of the Russian Federation is a unified federal procedural legislative act. While administrative legal proceeding is based on the Code of Administrative Judicial Procedure of the Russian Federation and the Arbitration Procedural Code of the Russian Federation — for economic disputes arising from administrative legal relations, the Code of Administrative Offenses of the Russian Federation (which will soon be replaced by a new one together with a separate one — fundamentally new Procedural Code of Administrative Offenses of the Russian Federation) and a number of other acts, including acts of constituent entities of the Russian Federation. Meanwhile, at the very beginning of this century, the State Duma developed and in the first reading adopted a draft federal law on administrative courts in the Russian Federation, which a few years later was excluded from the plan of legislative work of the State Duma due to, as the author believes, the absence of an appropriate procedural law. The unity of understanding of offences in the administrative and criminal fields is based on the fact that in both cases it is a socially dangerous act, the difference is only in the degree of public danger. Moreover, each of these types of offences is divided into a number of subspecies — also depending on the degree of public danger. In this connection the legalization of a criminal infraction as well as the introduction of criminal liability of legal entities would be appropriate within the framework of the issue under consideration. Then it will make possible legislative consolidation (in its final form) of a single "line" of offences, differentiated in detail (at about ten "categories") depending on the degree of public danger of each of the "categories", with a simultaneous (also a single law) legal procedural basis for regulating the procedure for considering cases of offenses