Notice of criminal liability: an effective measure of criminal procedure prevention or a relic of the past?

Being provided for by the criminal procedure legislation of the Russian Federation, notice of criminal liability of witnesses and victims for refusing to testify and intentionally making a false statement, experts – for giving willful false evidence, and other participants in criminal proceedings – for some other crimes against justice are subject to critical analysis. Such notice is referred to as self-evident procedural-preventive measure recognized by practitioners, subject to be applied in order to prevent the refusal or evasion of addressees from the proper execution of prohibitions and obligations applicable to them. At the same time, such measures are assessed as somewhat strange, poorly consistent with the well-known principle of the presumption of knowledge of the criminal law, including in the conditions of its fundamental refutation. In this regard, the reasons for introducing such requirements into the subject of criminal procedure regulation are revealed – they are seen in the circumstances of the emergence of the early Soviet system of criminal justice, caused by the denial of any religious rites in the activities of state bodies, including witness’s and expert’s oaths used in the legal proceedings of the Russian Empire. At the same time, the author discusses the reasons for the preservation and even expansion of such requirements in the post-Soviet period – they are presumably associated with the neglect of these issues by the authors and developers of the current criminal procedure law. In conclusion, the paper provides arguments that exclude the possibility of a complete restoration of pre-revolutionary guarantees of proper execution of procedural duties by participants in criminal proceedings. Moreover, the practice of using identical oaths is assessed as having a very high preventive potential, at least much greater in comparison with the currently used notice of criminal liability. In this regard, the legislator is invited to think about returning such legal guarantees to the sphere of criminal proceedings, but in a slightly different, purely secular form, i.e. excluding religious focus. At the same time, the author says that it is reasonable to deformalize notice of criminal liability and transfer it to the category of discretionary powers of inquiry officers, investigators, and judges for use at their own discretion for tactical purposes.