Entrepreneurs in criminal proceedings: guarantees of legal protection (Russian experience)

This article discusses the modernization of criminal procedure legislation relating to entrepreneurial activity. The optimization of the criminal procedural legislation made it possible to identify some areas of reform and differentiation of criminal proceedings according to “entrepreneurial structures”: firstly, the formation of criteria, the presence of which causes the transition from a general order to an extraordinary proceeding, and the introduction of economic terms into the sources of criminal procedural law; secondly, the creation of a special regime for the application of measures of criminal procedural coercion related to the restriction of freedom in relation to entrepreneurs; thirdly, an increase in guarantees for the protection of business property, expressed in a ban on the unreasonable use of measures that could lead to the suspension of the legal activities of legal entities or individual entrepreneurs. Attention is drawn to the fact that the Code of Criminal Procedure of the Russian Federation has created a legal mechanism aimed at effectively protecting in court the rights and legitimate interests of persons whose ownership is limited by an excessively long seizure of their property, allegedly obtained as a result of the criminal actions of the suspect, the accused. The authors noted that further modernization of the legislation governing criminal proceedings on “entrepreneurial offenses” should formulate the criteria for the transition from the general order to non-ordinary criminal proceedings extremely carefully and carefully. Expansion of the limits of extraordinary proceedings according to “entrepreneurial structures”, including despite the division according to the type of crimes in the current Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, is simply unacceptable. The implementation of existing legal mechanisms should focus on the protection of entrepreneurial production, and not on the personality of the entrepreneur himself. Particular attention is paid to the analysis of the main trends in the development of criminal and criminal procedure legislation, as well as the analysis of the legal positions of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation regarding the research issues.