Acts of the Russian Federation Constitutional Court in the context of criminal law linkages

The regulatory certainty of the provisions of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation is ensured by the presence of systemic hierarchical links between different legal prescriptions, including of the other-branch affiliation. Since the Russian legislation does not provide for the authentic interpretation of federal laws, the Russian Federation Constitutional Court plays an important role in the resolution of complicated issues of enforcement of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. As a rule, the doctrine gives a characteristic of particular decisions taken by it through the prism of problems of classification of specific crimes. However, proceeding from the growing scientific interest in interdisciplinary research, it seems necessary to accumulate the major legal provisions of the said court in terms of enforcement of the criminal law, with regard for its inter-sectoral bonds. The purpose of the research is to generalise the conclusions of the Russian Federation Constitutional Court on such fundamental issues as the grounds for criminal liability, timeframe validity of a criminal law, differentiation between crimes and administrative offences, prejudgement – and search of the optimal algorithm for their resolution in the future on this basis. The methodological basis of the study is represented by the general scientific methods of cognition: dialectical and systemic-structural; and as concerns the specific scientific methods – by the legalistic method. Following the analysis of a number of resolutions and rulings of the Russian Federation Constitutional Court for the period 2003-2020, an algorithm was developed for enforcement of the regulatory prescriptions of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation in the context of its inter-branch linkages. It was found out, on the basis of the study of sentences passed by the Russian courts, that the most common mistakes of law enforcement officers in extrapolating the legal provisions of the Russian Federation Constitutional Court within the framework of particular criminal cases are connected with incorrect interpretation of factual circumstances as well as the facts of transcending the content of the relevant norms of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation