The Institute of Contemporary Development hosted a meeting of the Expert Working Group of the Counsel for Promoting Development of Civil Society Institutes and Human Rights. The counsel, set up by the President of the Russian Federation and the Higher School of Economics, has tasked the working group to develop a concept for modernizing legislation concerning laws on economic crimes.

In recent years the need has become apparent for developing new approaches to criminal and civil regulation of economic relations.

Many of the current fundamental principles of criminal law in Russia were borrowed from the Soviet legal system, which reflected the realities of the planned economy of that era and hinder the development of modern economic relations.

According to experts, today criminal law in Russia is systematically abused in its application to economic relations. In particular, the unhealthy habit has developed with regard criminalizing ordinary economic activity with the aim of changing ownership to the benefit of illegal private interests.

The task of creating an environment conducive to entrepreneurship and investment, without which modernization is impossible, requires making changes to existing Russian legislation. The lack of proper legal regulation in the economic sphere, according to specialists, is a result of the fact that existing norms were created in the absence of a unified concept.

President Dmitry Medvedev tasked the working group to organize the development of a concept for modernizing criminal law in the economic sector by July 1, 2010.

The first meeting of the working group took place December 28, 2009, at INSOR. At today’s meeting the experts discussed the fundamental principles and structure of such a concept and its breadth. During the discussion it was stressed that concept should hold in common the aims of political and social-economic development as expressed in INSOR’s report “Russia of the 21st Century: Vision for the Future”.