The model of the prosecutor's activities in criminal proceedings: key challenges and opportunities for reform

Introduction: after the adoption of the Criminal Procedure Code of the Russian Federation, endless changes and additions are being made to it with alarming frequency. If desired, this situation can be explained by dynamically developing social relations, changing the state legal policy. However, it seems that numerous and often chaotic changes in the criminal procedure legislation are associated with the lack of a strategically verified and planned idea of the directions for the development of criminal proceedings. The development strategy of this type of state activities is largely influenced by the presence of a verified model of procedural activities of the prosecutor - one of the most influential subjects in the system of law enforcement agencies of any state, in any system of criminal proceedings. In this regard, the purpose of the paper is to identify the key problems in the legal model (the legislative regulation) and the actual model (the practice) of the prosecutor’s activities in criminal proceedings, to analyze their correlation and directions for their improvement, as well as the impact of these processes on the reform of the entire criminal procedure as a whole. Methods: the methodological framework for the research consists of the general scientific (dialectical, modeling method, system, structural-functional, logical, etc.) and the specific scientific (formal legal, comparative legal, etc.) research methods. Results: based on the analysis of the legislative provisions and law enforcement practice, it is concluded that there is a significant discrepancy between the current practice of prosecutorial activities in the criminal proceedings in the country and its legal regulation. Such a discrepancy between the legal and factual models of the prosecutor’s activities entails significant problems in law enforcement, which are caused by both shortcomings in the legal regulation of the prosecutor’s activities and the distortions of the law enforcement practice. Conclusions: the models of the prosecutor’s activities in criminal proceedings that exist today as autonomous (with a high level of inconsistency) - legal and factual, are the result of inconsistent changes in the domestic criminal procedure legislation introduced into it rather hastily, without conducting scientific examinations and assessing possible risks. As a result, the prosecutor’s management of pre- trial criminal prosecution continues to exist, but already as a “shadow practice” of the prosecutor. Overcoming the existing gap between the legal and actual models of the prosecutor’s activities will require reforming some procedures of criminal procedural activities, taking into account some factors revealed during this study, which, in fact, allows talking about the legal model of the prosecutor’s activities as the basis of the strategy of reforming criminal proceedings.