Technical and legal aspects of the construction and interpretation of norms on mercenary activities in Russian criminal law

Abstract

The article examines the problems of regulating responsibility for mercenary activities in domestic criminal law, examines doctrinal approaches to the construction and application of responsibility for this war crime. In the modern world, mercenary activity is becoming more common in military conflicts. Mercenaries are a group of people who participate in hostilities in order to receive financial rewards, who do not have citizenship of the country where the hostilities are taking place, and do not permanently reside on its territory. Based on the analysis of the current norms of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, the paper concludes that the concept of mercenary activity and its varieties are defined in accordance with the principles laid down in the International Convention against the Recruitment, Use, Financing and Training of Mercenaries of 1989. The author explores theoretical provisions with a practical focus on further improvement of the current criminal legislation on responsibility for mercenary activities for the effective prevention, detection and suppression of this type of illegal activities. The article notes that the crime under study is characterized by a complex object, since as the main, additional and optional objects it encroaches on the foundations of the constitutional order and security of the state, on the rules of warfare, on the peaceful existence of mankind and states, on the rights of minors. The paper also analyzes various solutions and approaches to the problem of defining the legal content of the concepts of "mercenary", "recruitment", "armed conflict".