Institution of additional investigation in the legislation of the Russian Federation and the Republic of Belarus: origins and development trends

The paper analyzes the problem of overcoming the objectively existing contradiction between the institution of returning a criminal case for additional investigation and the adversarial principle. Despite the enshrinement of the principle of adversarial proceedings and equality of parties in Art. 15 of the Code of Criminal Procedure of the Russian Federation, the initially eliminated institution of additional investigation was soon restored in its previous form. This allows the court, instead of pronouncing an acquittal, to provide the investigator with an additional possibility to continue collecting accusatory evidence. The purpose of the work is to search for alternative ways to ensure the effectiveness of criminal proceedings complying with the principles of the Russian criminal procedure, including those tested in the Republic of Belarus. In the Republic of Belarus, the technique of changing the charge to a more serious one directly during the trial and eliminating the incompleteness of the preliminary investigation by suspending the trial proceedings to collect additional evidence is used as such method. Taking into account the dynamics of legal phenomena and legal means, using methods of historical and comparative analysis, the author of the paper studies the origins of the institution of additional investigation in the Russian Federation and the Republic of Belarus, analyzes its development, and compares the means of criminal procedural response to the errors of the preliminary investigation revealed during the trial. The study demonstrates the failure of the experience of both countries, as they have failed to free the court from its unusual duty to make up for shortcomings and eliminate errors in the preliminary investigation. The author concludes that it is necessary to search for fundamentally different means of improving the quality of the preliminary investigation directly during pre-trial proceedings.