LEGAL STATUS OF THE HEAD OF INQUIRY DEPARTMENT: SUBSTANCE, STRUCTURE, CHARACTERISTICS

The paper deals with the problem of determining the legal status of the head of an inquiry department and its legislative regulation. The authors note that the head of an inquiry department is an official of an agency of inquiry authorized to exercise criminal procedural powers as prescribed by law. The study shows that the structure of legal status of the inquiry department head includes the procedural powers of three types: administrative powers towards an investigator; powers for initiation of proceedings, committal for trial, and investigation of a criminal case, as well as the imposition of obligations on management of an investigators’ group; subjective rights exercised by an inquiry department head in the process of exercising the abovementioned authorities. The paper compares separate elements of the legal status of the inquiry department head with those of the legal status of other criminal process members: head of an agency of inquiry, head of an investigating authority, and a prosecutor. In particular, the paper states that the head of an investigating authority is more an individual procedural figure than the head of an inquiry department. The analysis of legislative provisions specified in the RF Criminal Code shows that the head of an investigating authority has rather more powers influencing the preliminary investigation course than the head of an inquiry department. As for the powers of the head of an inquiry agency, they partially repeat those of the inquiry department head. The paper states that such a state of matters negatively influences the implementation of activities on the criminal cases preliminary investigation in the form of an inquiry. The authors suggest two ways of solving the problem of duplicating the elements of the legal status of the head of an inquiry agency and the inquiry department head. The top choice of them is to exclude from the legal status of the head of an inquiry agency those procedural powers through which the control for the activity of the subjects carrying out the preliminary investigation in the form of inquiry is performed.