The Requirement of Legality of Decisions of the Criminal Court: The Legal Basis and Content Components

Legality as a complex legal requirement to judicial decisions, developed for a long time by Russian science and legal practice, was formally consolidated in the Criminal Procedure Code of the Russian Federation in 2001 and extended to all decisions of the criminal court. However, the wording of the law does not fully and adequately reflect the content of this requirement, and to some extent it contradicts the established scientific ideas and needs of judicial practice. In this regard, the author aims to reveal the content side of the concept of legality of judicial decisions in criminal proceedings, both from a historical perspective and from the perspective of modern legal understanding, and to justify the need to adjust the legislative expression of this requirement. The research problems are solved using historical, dialectical and comparative legal methods of cognition based on the analysis of relevant theoretical concepts developed by the Russian science of criminal procedure law, the provisions of criminal procedure legislation and the legal positions of the judicial authorities: the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, federal courts of general jurisdiction. The legal sources of regulatory requirements that the criminal court should follow when making procedural decisions have been identified. The author substantiates the need for an expanded understanding of the legality of judicial decisions as their compliance not only with direct instructions of the law, but also with legal provisions contained in other forms of law: constitutional norms, generally recognized principles and norms of international law, established legal customs, as well as standards of justice developed by judicial practice and legal positions on specific issues of law enforcement. In the context of historical development, the material and procedural aspects of the requirement of legality of judicial decisions in criminal proceedings are analyzed and its content components are formulated. Continuity and at the same time dynamism of doctrinal and legislative approaches to determining the legality of court decisions supported by judicial practice are noted. Certain shortcomings of the normative consolidation of the requirement of legality of court decisions in the current Criminal Procedure Code of the Russian Federation are revealed, in connection with which specific proposals are made to change and optimize certain formulations of the procedural law that determine the content of the requirement of legality of a sentence and other court decisions in criminal proceedings.