Human Life as a Priority Object of Protection under Criminal Law

The author of the paper proceeds from inviolability of the premise that a person’s life presides the hierarchy of values protected by criminal law. Recognition and actual consolidation of this provision is one of unconditional achievements adopted in the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation of 1996. However, a myriad of additions and amendments made to the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation after it entered into force raises the question of whether they do not call into question the postulate of human life as a priority object of criminal protection?

To answer this question, the paper substantiates the thesis that decisive indicators of assessing a person’s life as the most important object of criminal law protection take the place in the system of the Special Part of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, which the legislator has assigned to infringeent on life (primarily murder), and the grounds that are established by the General Part of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation for imposing the strictest of all types of punishment (life imprisonment or death penalty). Based on these indicators, initially established in the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, the author concludes that at the time of its entry into force, a human life was really at the top of the system of values and goods protected by the Criminal Code. However, at present this conclusion cannot be considered indisputable, since the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation has introduced other norms where the sanctions are stricter than the sanctions of the norm on murder, and the grounds for the appointment of life imprisonment now include not only encroachments on human life. The author proposes to construct sanctions norms — both newly introduced and already existing — in such a way that no crime can be punished more severely than murder. In addition, the author proposes to abandon the legislative and law enforcement practice of absorbing murder by qualifying elements of other crimes, bearing in mind that they should be qualified only cumulatively.

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