The concept and role of the victim in the system of participants in criminal proceedings: a comparative legal analysis of the legislation of Russia and the CIS countries

The object of the study is the social relations concerning the victim in the criminal proceedings of Russia and the CIS countries. The subject of the study is the norms of the criminal procedural legislation of Russia and the CIS countries that regulate the concept of the victim, their place among the participants in the criminal proceedings, and define the functions they perform during criminal case proceedings; also analyzed were scientific articles, monographs, and dissertations dedicated to the above-mentioned issues. The aim of the work is a comprehensive analysis of the norms of criminal procedural legislation of Russia and the CIS countries, on the basis of which the advantages and disadvantages of domestic legal regulation of the concept of the victim and their place in the system of participants in the criminal process are identified, and proposals for its improvement are formulated. The research methods used included dialectical, comparative-legal, inductive, and deductive methods. Together, they allowed for the study of the concept of the victim, their place among the participants in the criminal process, the comparison of existing approaches to definitions of the victim in the legislation of individual CIS countries, the identification of their positive and negative aspects, and, based on the findings of the research, the formulation and justification of conclusions. The scientific novelty of the research lies in the fact that the comparative-legal analysis of the legislation of Russia and the CIS countries allowed for a different perspective on the domestic legal regulation of issues related to the concept of the victim, highlighting both positive and negative aspects. The main conclusions of the research are: a proposal to improve the legislative definition of "victim" as enshrined in the Criminal Procedure Code of the Russian Federation by including a reference to the possibility of recognizing a person as a victim as a result of harm caused not only by a crime but also by a socially dangerous act that contains elements of a crime; a conclusion that the current classification of participants in the criminal process does not accurately reflect the existing state of affairs and, in particular, that the victim primarily performs not the function of prosecution but the function of protecting their interests; and a conclusion regarding the reasonableness and fairness of the contemporary legislator's approach that allows legal entities to participate in criminal proceedings as victims.

criminal proceedings, participant in criminal proceedings, victim, adversarial principle, criminal procedure function, the prosecution, criminal prosecution, procedural status, comparative analysis, foreign experience