Criminal law protection of elections in the Russian Federation

The study is of a dogmatic and empirical nature. It presents the scope of legal regulation of selected crimes against constitutional rights and freedoms of a human and citizen contained in the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation of 1996. It discusses the provisions concerning violations of law that may occur at different stages of the electoral process. The study describes forbidden behaviours of a voter, a member of an electoral commission and an electoral committee, a participant of a referendum initiative group and another group of referendum participants, as well as acts committed against the mentioned subjects. They were analysed according to the classical arrangement of the statutory attributes of a criminal offence. The analysis confirmed the validity of the criminalisation of many behaviours that impede the holding of lawful, reliable and fair elections. Next, the study presents a statistical picture of the analysed acts. The dynamics of registered offences against elections in the years 1997-2017 (from the first year of the Penal Code of 1996 to the present day) and the number of convictions for their commission in the period 2009-2017 were presented (due to limited access to data). This allowed to show the scale of the phenomenon and the reaction of the courts to it.