CRIMINAL RESPONSIBILITY FOR INCITEMENT TO HATRED, ENMITY AND INSULTING RELIGIOUS FEELINGS OF BELIEVERS: EXPERIENCE OF RUSSIA AND CHINA

Abstract

The present paper conducts a comparative analysis of the standards in Russian and Chinese criminal legislations, that establish a criminal responsibility for violation of a right for the liberty of conscience and religions, and also the standards providing responsibility for incitement to hatred or enmity and humiliation of human dignity of people belonging to a different race, nationality, language, identity or religion, as well as for violation of the right for the freedom of conscious or beliefs. The author discloses the contents of dispositions of the relevant criminal provisions, analyzes the standards in Russia and China; considers the key elements of the corpus delicti in both Criminal Codes which are an object of the research; points out criteria which allow to differentiate penal provisions. Moreover, the paper analyzes the trends in changing criminal legislation providing responsibility for the violation of a right for the liberty of conscience and religions, and also the standards of responsibility for incitement to hatred or enmity and humiliation of human dignity. The paper critically analyzes an ambiguously estimated by experts approach of a Russian legislator to criminal legal protection of the specified problems, analyzes potentially possible issues of law enforcement, considers internal contradictions of the criminal law in this part and problems of its correlation with the standards of the Constitution and international legislation. The author is convinced that so far there have been no objective needs for the introduction to the Russian Criminal Code of a special norm establishing responsibility for insulting feelings of believers. Insulting the feelings of believers, as the work shows, could be qualified (and it was successfully qualified in practice) under the Article 282 of the Criminal code of the Russian Federation providing responsibility for incitement to hatred or enmity and also on humiliation of dignity of a human or a group of humans according to sex, race, nationality, language, origin, religious attitudes and any social group membership. The transition to a causal approach in designing of criminal precepts of the law testifies is evidence of the insufficient level of the legal equipment, the absence of an accurate concept of the development of Russian criminal legislation.