Extremism. Juridical Abstraction. Problems of Demarcating the Freedom of Expression

Abstract

The authors examine the juridical idea of extremist used in the criminal law of the Russian Federation. This work is an attempt to solve the problem of differentiating between this concept and the freedom of expression. The establishment of boundaries and limits of these phenomena is important for both lawmakers and law enforcers. The authors use the attributes of the phenomenon of «extremism» in an attempt to understand its form and contents. To achieve this, they analyze views on different scholars on extremism, the law and its amendments, clarifications of the highest court authorities of the country regarding the object of this research, and study the doctrinal practice of experts – linguists and psychologists. They synthesize the discovered meanings of extremism and identify its features. The obtained information allowed the authors to conclude that the definition of extremism formulated in the law is not precise, it lacks clear boundaries and, at the categorial level, could be viewed as an abstract concept. This concept, incorporated in the law, has a negative impact on the quality of the law and impedes the right choice of interpretation by national courts. The fuzziness of legal prescriptions has not yet been eliminated by the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation and the law enforcement practice of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation. All this creates endless opportunities for interpreting the law at the local level. The authors present disturbing statistics that show a tremendous growth in the number of offences in this area in recent years. They believe that the cause of the problem is the above-mentioned law that allows excessive interpretation by the law enforcer. The presented research deals with the bottlenecks of constitutional law as it analyzes the freedom of expression with its boundaries and limits. The authors discuss the conflict of constitutional and criminal laws from the viewpoint of enforcing specific law clauses. The research includes constructive criticism of the instruments used by experts (linguists and psychologists) who perform their tasks for criminal cases and materials on speech goals, which belongs to the domain of criminalistics. The authors present their own vision of this problem based on the opinion of scholars, historical experience and court practice.