The paper analyzes approaches to determining environmentally conscious («green») payments. Under the broader approach, environmentally conscious payments include any payments that contribute to the internalization of negative environmental external factors, i.e., to cover the public costs associated with environmental protection arising from the activities of business entities. Under the narrower approach, environmentally conscious («green») payments include only nature conservation, i.e., a form of alienation of funds that is compensatory in nature. Such qualification will be possible if: a) the legal basis for the obligation to pay is the implementation of activities related to environmental pollution, and (or) b) the purpose of establishing payments is to provide financial support for measures aimed at compensating for damage already caused and preventing its occurrence in the future (this can be achieved both by «coloring green» and simply by indicating the purposes for which payments are charged). In the framework of the third — special — approach, not all environmental payments are environmental, but only «colored», i.e., having a strictly targeted nature (at the same time, the amount of received payments should be used to finance the corresponding expenses, and not their equivalent).

Currently, environmental taxation is a recognized instrument of States’ environmental policy in their fight against climate change and in protecting the environment. The complexity of the tasks that States are facing in setting environmental taxes requires an analysis of macro and microeconomic indicators, as well as social consequences. The purpose of the paper is to study the implementation of the environmental taxation system. The paper examines the economic concepts of using taxes as a means of regulating the environmental sphere, determines the essence of environmental taxes and the principles of their organization. The paper analyzes various models and concepts of taxation, their advantages and disadvantages, determines the principles of building an environmental taxation system, and elucidates the ways to optimize the environmental tax system to achieve the best environmental and economic results. In addition, the author examines the potential obstacles faced by the State when introducing environmental taxation as an instrument of environmental regulation, taking into account the existing experience.

The paper examines digital democracy as one of the elements of the digital state. Digital democracy is defined as an evolutionary transformation of traditional democracy due to the digitalization of the political and legal space, a new way of political participation through which citizens can express political will using information and communication technologies. It has been established that digital democracy in the country is developing nonuniformly, due to the problem of digital inequality. Other problems of the implementation of digital democracy that require a solution include: the lack of procedures that would guarantee equality of opportunity when citizens submit appeals on socio-political issues in various forms (oral/written and in the form of an electronic document); the problem of identification and authentication of subjects entering into interaction in a digital environment; the problem of the lack of effective tools to popularize e-democracy mechanisms among the population; information security problem. It has been shown that digital democracy, in comparison with traditional democracy, is more functional, ensuring the mass participation of citizens in public power activities. The adoption of the concept of the development of digital democracy will have a positive impact on the formation and implementation of public policy in the development of digital democracy. It is stated that in the future, the development of digital democracy will be aimed at crowding out non-digital ways of citizens’ participation in the political life of the country. However, digital democracy should not completely replace classical democracy. It is necessary to provide the right of citizens to refuse to participate in «digital» relations and the opportunity to express their political will in the traditional way. 

Until 2018, the savings certificate was a very attractive and popular banking product. However, after amendments to legislation that led to the abolition of presenting savings certificates, in 2018 credit organizations stopped issuing them. In turn, credit organizations prefer not to issue registered savings certificates, since it is more profitable for them to place funds of the population in deposits that are not certified by savings certificates.

The paper assesses the reasons for the prohibition of presenting certificates, establishes their insufficient validity. The paper is relevant since it examines not only the aforementioned legal problem, which requires a legislative reaction, but also he increased need of the Russian economy for «long money» over the past two years. The President of the Russian Federation in his Address to the Federal Assembly in February 2024 proposed to provide special conditions for the placement of irrevocable certificates that would stimulate the population to invest in them at the level of legislation. The paper analyzed the idea of issuing irrevocable certificates and evaluates the conditions for their placement in terms of their attractiveness to the population.

The paper elucidates the problems of judicial competence within the framework of the Eurasian Economic Union and its relationship with national justice. The procedural aspect of the right to judicial protection includes the problem of the interpretation and implementation of international law in the systems of law of the members of the Union. The direct method of implementing the law of the Union is intended to be a priority and it presumes its direct application by national courts. The indirect method involves the implementation of the law of the Union through the consideration of the standings of the Court of the Eurasian Economic Union by national courts. The retrospective consideration of the standings of the Court of the Union through the revision of judicial acts due to new circumstances constitutes a form of the indirect method of introducing the law of the Union into the law of Russia. The substantive law aspect of the right to judicial protection in the Eurasian Economic Union includes the problem of taking from the jurisdiction of the Court of the Union disputes according to the subject and subject matter criteria, namely: restriction on the appeal to the Court of the Union of persons who do not have the status of an economic entity, as well as impossibility of judicial challenge of regulatory legal acts adopted by the bodies of the Union. The main criterion for such an exemption is the lack of formalization of these categories of cases in international law. The author concludes that it is advisable to recreate judicial powers at the union and national levels in this extensive segment of cases. The direct connection between judicial competence and its formalization in the norms of law is impractical due to the objective lag of any lawmaker, including the bodies of the Eurasian Economic Union, from the development of real social relations and new needs associated with the settlement of numerous disputes.

Social rights have a number of specific features that distinguish them from general human and civil rights and freedoms. In particular, the paper highlights that these rights do not have a clearly established list of powers; they are largely determined by positive legislation, etc. These features make it necessary to raise the question of the possibility of their identification as constitutional rights. Most often, an individual enjoys sectoral social rights: the right to pension and social security, the right to medical care, etc. — as they are defined by positive legislation. However, according to the Constitution of the Russian Federation, all the rights that it provides are natural: they are inalienable, belong to everyone from birth, inherent to the nature of man, and are not granted by the State, etc. The authors attempt to substantiate the legal nature of constitutional social rights. They conclude that the constitutional right is directly expressed in the ability to challenge the model of its implementation proposed by the legislator from the standpoint of the content of this right. In the same case, when the model of ensuring this constitutional right used by the legislator does not fulfill such a function, a citizen can apply to the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation with a request to find it as inconsistent with the Constitution of the Russian Federation.

Sustainable development as an urgent agenda for the formation and implementation of social relations in the modern world is focused on solving a variety of problems that the states and society are facing, and that affect a variety of legal relations. Law, being a system of norms governing social relations, also covers relations in the field of sustainable development. Comparative methodology in relation to sustainable development is manifested through the prism of evaluating activities aimed at assessing compliance with various norms in the field of sustainable development. The main problem is that ESG evaluation of different providers of relevant services differ significantly due to differences in approaches to the analysis of ESG ratings of different rating agencies. A clear and transparent system for rating and evaluating the compliance of the activities of legal entities with the principles of sustainable development based on effective normative regulation in the context of different approaches to rating models in the field of sustainable development, as well as ESG standards that differ in the world, is an essential component of the implementation of ESG principles both at the international level and in the context of the development of the Russian national standard for sustainable development.

The paper is devoted to the analysis of recommendations of the Plenum of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation providing for the procedure of applying Part 6 of Art. 15 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation that was introduced into the criminal law environment in December 2011. With the adoption of this norm, both positive and negative assessments of this legislative initiative began to appear in special literature. Often, authors criticized the provisions under consideration due to the lack of detailed recommendations on the use of the provisions of Part 6 of Art. 15 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, which would contribute to uniform law enforcement. With the adoption on 15 May 2018 by the Plenum of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation of Resolution No. 10 «On the Practice of the Application by the Courts of the Provisions of Part 6 of Article 15 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation», some pressing issues were resolved. At the same time, there was some understatement on the pages of the resolution, for example, regarding the legal consequences of decreasing the gravity of a crime. We also witness contradictions of individual clarifications to the current criminal law. Taking into account that the resolutions of the Plenum of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation are formally addressed to the courts, but in their activities they are actively used by lawyers, the academic community, and law students, the identified ambiguous points require further examination and an appropriate response from the Supreme Court.

The paper states that civil and criminal procedural legislation regulating rehabilitation does not have a strict division into general and special norms and should be applied simultaneously and comprehensively. Despite the fact that civil legislation specifies the application of only two preventive measures as grounds for the emergence of the right to rehabilitation — detention and travel restriction order. This right arises in the event of the illegal selection of all preventive measures provided for by the criminal procedure law. Such a basis for rehabilitation as the use of coercive measures also applies to persons directly in relation to whom investigative actions were carried out that restricted personal rights. In the criminal procedure legislation of the Russian Federation, it is advisable to establish such a circumstance, which excludes rehabilitation, as self-incrimination of the accused (suspect). Partial termination of criminal prosecution entails the right to rehabilitation only if it concerns a separate episode of criminal activity that was originally incriminated to the person. A reduction in the scope of the charge within the framework of one fact may entail the emergence of the right to rehabilitation only on condition that the original charge, due to its gravity, entailed the occurrence of such legal consequences that, in principle, could not have occurred if the charge had been brought in a reduced scope.

The paper, studying several decisions of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation, examines the interdisciplinary nature of exemption from criminal liability and the mutual influence of criminal law and criminal procedure legislation on the norms of this institution. Based on practical experience, the legislator currently continues to make changes to this institution. Thus, exemption from criminal liability can be considered as an absolutely independent and separate inter-branch institution, which establishes a direct influence of the inter-branch nature of exemption from criminal liability not only on its internal «compromise» nature, but also on the procedure for its implementation. Exemption from criminal liability is not a strict imperative consequence of objectively determined circumstances of criminal law, but the result of the choice and agreement of two parties in criminal proceedings when such circumstances arise.

The author has developed a forensic classification of the most relevant digital traces of crimes in the financial market, the establishment and seizure of which is of great importance in identifying and detecting the organizers of criminal schemes in the context of digital transformation. The author sets the task to analyze digital traces that appear in the process committing crimes in the financial market. It is taken into account that a number of criminal acts can be committed in the legal financial market with the involvement of financial organizations and their employees, as well as in the illegal financial market, which forms the shadow sector of illegal financial services, including the formation of financial pyramids. The result of the study is the conclusion that digital traces in the case of crimes involving licensed financial organizations and involving illegal entities of the financial market differ in their content, as well as in the degree of their preservation from destruction, which in some cases requires prompt measures to record and seize them. The author concluded that successful investigation of crimes in the financial market largely depends on the results of expert studies of digital traces of economic content and computer information, which require a range of forensic examinations.

The paper presents an overview of criminal threats in the field of exploitation of smart devices (IoT devices). Particular attention is given to the use of botnets of compromised smart devices to carry out DDoS attacks, distribute malware, mine cryptocurrency, and turn smart devices into proxy servers. The author examines the main factors that determine the vulnerability of smart devices. It is concluded that IoT devices are valuable sources of forensically significant information, primarily information about spatio-temporal factors. The possibility of using smart devices to counteract crime investigations was noted. The author draws attention to the advisability of involving a specialist to work with smart devices during investigative actions, since smart devices are carriers of digital traces. The importance of the preparatory stage in conducting investigative actions that involve working with smart devices is emphasized. An algorithm for the step-by-step verification of forensically significant information obtained from smart devices has been formulated.

The paper analyzes international legal structure of the buffer zone and covers the use of buffer zones in various types of human activities. The different functional orientations of buffer zones are noted, united by their common purpose — smoothing out social conflicts. The genesis of this phenomenon in the international regulatory system and national legal orders is considered, and the special role of the experience of creating buffer zones in the system of biosphere reserves is shown. The legal framework governing the buffer zone regime in the Guidelines for the Implementation of the Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage has been subjected to a detailed analysis. The foreign practice of creating buffer zones at world natural heritage sites is studied, and the diversity of their spatial configuration and functional orientation is shown. The features of creating buffer zones of World Natural Heritage sites in Russia are analyzed. Various options for implementing the recommendation of the monitoring mission of the World Heritage Centre and the International Union for Conservation of Nature to create a buffer zone of Lake Baikal as a World Heritage Site are shown.

The paper analyzes the regulatory legal acts of the USA, Great Britain, Canada and Australia, which became the basis for the abolition of the most favored nation status in relation to Russia in 2022. The hypothesis is examined that unilateral restrictive measures (financial sanctions) imposed by WTO member states to introduce additional customs tariffs in relation to other WTO members are illegal and violate the principle of non-discrimination in international trade. The paper examines the tendency to transform the goals and objectives of using the most favored nation principle and national treatment: from the original (removing barriers to world trade, opening new markets) to the current ones in the form of sanctions policy instruments. Manipulation of these principles depending on the economic interests of individual states is contrary to WTO norms. The approach of justifying financial sanctions by the aim of protecting essential national security interests through Article XXI (b) (iii) of GATT 1947 is criticized.

The paper examines public law regulators of foreign trade in goods, called special economic measures and measures of influence (counteraction) in Russian legislation. A comparative analysis of these measures is carried out with the uniform measures of non-tariff regulation of the Eurasian Economic Union. The fundamental difference between them is emphasized. Examples of special economic measures, measures of influence (counteraction), as well as the results of resolving an international dispute on the restriction of transit traffic through the territory of Russia are presented. The similarities and differences between special economic measures and measures of influence (counteraction) in by-laws are demonstrated. Attention is given to the terminology used in customs legal relations when monitoring compliance by individuals with prohibitions on the export of goods to unfriendly countries. The features of customs declaration of goods that create risks of violating established prohibitions are revealed. Regulatory clarifications are proposed that eliminate the possibility of circumventing measures of influence (counteraction) and preserve the rights of bona fide participants in foreign trade activities.

The paper is devoted to the consideration of the features of private law regulation of renewable energy. In particular, the specifics of private law regulation in the specified area are highlighted. It is related to establishing the legal regime of facilities for generating energy based on renewable energy sources (RES); creating private law mechanisms aimed at developing the generation of electricity based on RES, including legal regulation of the circulation of certificates of origin of the specified electricity; establishing the legal status of participants in relations in the sphere of production and circulation of this electricity. Particular attention is given to the mechanism established by law for the circulation of generation attributes and certificates of origin of electricity. The structures of these legal instruments are examined in detail, and their legal nature is revealed. The advisability of the parallel existence in the legal plane of generation attributes and certificates of origin of electricity is questioned. Based on the analysis of foreign experience in legal regulation, proposals are made to optimize the mechanism for the functioning of the market for these certificates, and the specifics of trading I-REC certificates are considered.