Countering the illegal migration organisation in the Russian Federation: A new vector for criminal legislation development

Abstract

The aim of the research is to address the problem of regulation and implementation of criminal responsibility for illegal migration organisation and to determine, on this basis, the course of action to enhance Article 3221 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation containing the corpus delicti and its application in practice. The problem is the absence of the necessary coherence of Article 3221 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation with the international law provisions aimed at illegal migration organisation countering. Alongside this challenge, there is another one: of inadequate legal certainty of this criminal legal norm disposition, which complicates its uniform interpretation and further practical application in allowing for competition with the articles of the Code of Administrative Offences of the Russian Federation, establishing liability for related criminal acts. The general dialectical method of enquiry, general scientific and specific scientific methods, including the comparative legal method, the method of statistical analysis and the method of legal modelling are used in this article to address the issue. As a result of the conducted research, the authors conclude that the existing approach to improving the legislative framework and practice of countering the organisation of illegal migration in the Russian Federation needs to be changed. More specifically, given the need to harmonise Russian and international legislation in this field, the authors propose to complement the mental element of the corpus delicti of the irregular migration organisation with an indication of the mandatory aim in the form of the perpetrator's desire to obtain, directly or indirectly, financial or other material benefit. As a result, this criminal law prohibition will be aligned with the provisions of Paragraph 1 and Article 6 (2)(c) of the Protocol against the Smuggling of Migrants by Land, Sea and Air. Furthermore, this research substantiates the need to specify the disposition of Article 3221 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation in terms of the content of actions that comprise the illegal migration organisation actus reus and to mark which specific types of migration legislation violations constitute the crime, as well as to explicitly indicate that this criminal law norm shall be applied, if the act is not covered by Art. 322, Art. 3222 or Art. 3223 of the RF Criminal Code. Based on administrative and criminal legislation analysis, the authors argue for the deletion of criminal liability for a single violation of migration legislation, including for organizing a foreign citizen's or a stateless person's irregular migration committed by a person who is not subject to an administrative penalty for a misdemeanor in the migration field. Thus, the authors underline the need of systematic cross-sectoral changes in the current migration legislation.