On the Procedural Status of the Procurator in Non-Judicial Administrative Procedure

For the last three centuries of the Russian state’s history the procuratorate, or procuracy, has played a special role in the state apparatus. This was contemplated recently, in particular, in Art. 129 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation, as amended in 2020. Such a role, in turn, is a prerequisite of the special status of the procurator not only in criminal and civil procedure, but also – and even especially – in administrative procedure, which was emphasized not only by Russian, but also by foreign authors. However, the issue of the procurator’s status in administrative procedure has not yet been studied enough, and existing studies consider only the judicial administrative procedure (administrative court procedure). At the same time the status of the procurator in non-judicial administrative procedure poses an interest not just from a scholarly, but also from a purely practical point of view. Studying the procuratorial supervision from an administrative procedural point of view using a modern integrative approach to administrative procedure is hence apparent. Although there is no general administrative procedure act in Russia and the regulations on administrative procedure are largely somewhat of a patchwork, the analysis of the procurator’s procedural status in the legislation on control and supervisory activities, as well as administrative penal, tax and some other laws allows to put together a classification of the procurator’s administrative procedural functions and to propose guidelines for the further development of the legislation with regard to them.
The purpose of the work is a comprehensive study of the administrative procedural status of the procurator in Russian non-judicial administrative procedure. The objectives of the study are: 1) defining the procedural status of the procurator as that of a representative of the general state public interest in non-judicial administrative procedure; 2) formulating the problem of patchwork, or fragmentary, regulation of non-judicial administrative procedure and, therefore, of the procurator’s status in various administrative proceedings.
The study used systematic, logical, formal and legal, as well as comparative methods.
Brief Conclusions. Based on the analysis of the norms of the administrative procedural legislation of the Russian Federation in the article: 1) the procedural status of the procurator as that of a representative of the general state public interest in non-judicial administrative procedure is defined; 2) a classification of the procurator’s administrative procedural functions in non-judicial administrative procedure (these include: initiating of a proceeding; intervening into an already initiated procedure; sanctioning; and resolving a dispute on jurisdiction) is proposed; 3) the problems of the legal regulation of administrative proceedings and the necessity of providing for a unified procedural status of the procurator in administrative proceedings is emphasized.