Genesis of Approaches to Legal and Doctrinal Definition of Criminal Offense

Abstract

The concept of a criminal offense according to experts has been known to the national legislator and law enforcement for about three centuries. In the pre-revolutionary period, the notion of misdemeanor along with the concept of crime was enshrined in the Code of Criminal Laws of 1832, in all editions of the Code of Criminal and Correctional Penalties of 1845, in the Criminal Code of 1903. In these legal acts, offense, like crimes, were considered as a variety of criminal illegal acts. In the Criminal Codes of the RSFSR in 1922, 1926, 1960, the concept of a criminal offense was not fixed. In the draft Code of Criminal Offenses (1973), which was not adopted, the criminal offense was proposed to be considered as а non-criminal offence. In 1977, the Fundamentals of Criminal Legislation of the USSR and the Union Republics of 1958 and the Criminal Code of the RSFSR in 1960 introduced provisions on crimes that do not pose a great public danger. In the early 1990s, the introduction of criminal offenses as an independent group of criminal acts was proposed in some projects of the Criminal Code. The problem of a criminal offense is not new for the domestic science of criminal law. In the criminal legal doctrine of the pre-revolutionary period, the allocation of criminal offenses was justified by dividing “according to the kind of iniquity”. In the Soviet period, the problem of a criminal offense began to be actively discussed from the 1960s. Most of academics considered the criminal offense as a kind of crime, which has a certain degree of public danger. It was quite popular that the criminal offense was viewed as a kind of socially dangerous act prohibited by Criminal Code along with a crime. Some researchers considered it as an act that was not at criminal-illegal and criminally punishable. In the modern Russian doctrine of criminal law, essentially the same three basic positions have been preserved in the matter of determining the nature of a criminal offense. In the case of implementing the legislative initiative, issued in the form of Resolution of the Plenum of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation of October 31, 2017 No. 42, the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation will introduce the concept of a criminal offense, which will be understood only as a sub-category of crimes of small gravity.