Annotation

This article analyzes the effectiveness of the July 2022 legislative amendment—the introduction of Part 4 of Article 286 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, which for the first time established criminal liability for abuse of office involving torture. Based on official statistics from the Judicial Department of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, the author demonstrates the paradoxical stability of law enforcement practice: despite the introduction of a special provision and the presence of a legal definition of torture in a note to the article, the number of convictions under this offense remains critically low, amid hundreds of cases of abuse of office without this qualifying characteristic. The author argues that these statistics do not indicate the eradication of the problem or the preventive effect of the law. The main reason for the low detection rate is the exceptional difficulty of proving the use of torture, especially when it involves inflicting mental suffering or concealing traces of the crime. Specific legal measures are proposed as solutions to these problems: specifying the concept of "moral suffering" directly in the text of the criminal law or introducing corresponding clarifications into Resolution No. 19 of the Plenum of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation of October 16, 2009. It is concluded that an effective fight against torture requires a comprehensive approach and joint efforts by legislators, courts, and law enforcement agencies to change approaches to the investigation of this category of crimes.