Indictment: procedural purpose

The paper analyzes the problems of the procedural purpose of the indictment as a law enforcement act that completes the pre-trial investigation of a criminal case. The relevance of the study is caused by the duplication of the role of the indictment and the decision on indictment as a defendant, which arises from the system of procedural legislation and the common investigative practice, in terms of establishing the scope, content, and boundaries, in other words, determining the subject of the upcoming criminal trial at first instance. Based on the traditional for national criminal justice concept of retaining the institute of indictment as a defendant, the author substantiates the thesis about the misunderstanding of the indictment as a document determining the content and parameters of a criminal complaint made against an accused. The paper clarifies that during the pre-trial investigation, such a role can only belong to the decision on indictment as a defendant. The author analyzes the reasons influenced the emergence of the identified doctrinal-legal dissonance that are associated with the not quite reasonable law-making policy typical for the development of Soviet and post-Soviet criminal justice. The author proposes to reduce the procedural significance of the indictment not to the formulation of the subject of the upcoming criminal trial at first instance, but only to summarizing the results of the pre-trial investigation and the final recognition of its results appropriate for legal proceedings on merits, as well as to determining the moment of formal completion of pre-trial proceedings and the termination of all legal relations inherent in this criminal procedure stage. It is proposed to consider the indictment a reason (legal fact) for the commencement of judicial proceedings. Moreover, the author mentions other purposes of the indictment – law enforcement and organizational and technical.