The investigators’ powers will be corrected

The senators decided to put the rules of familiarizing the accused and their defendants with the criminal cases in order. The respective amendments to the Penal Procedural Code have already been submitted to the State Duma. The investigation loses its ability to constantly add new documents to the criminal case files. On the other hand, the investigators will be able to set clear deadlines for the attorneys and their charges to read large books of the case materials.

Igor Pastukhov, Adviser of the Law Firm "YUST", sees the draft law as a whole as “reasonable and useful”. According to him, the problem does exist: “The investigator is bureaucratically interested in a most prompt transfer of the case together with the accusatory opinion to the prosecutor, reporting on it and forgetting it”.  The lawyer says that this is the origin of the post factum dates on the interrogation minutes, and “the responses to the queries that are dated later than the beginning of the familiarization”.

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