The RA Prosecutor General’s Office continues the proactive policy for the improvement of legislation in the field of punishment and other means of enforcement and criminal justice submitting the Government definite proposals of legislative amendments.

 

In particular, in the frame of prosecutorial function over legality of penalty and other means of compulsion the RA Prosecutor General’s Office studied the sphere of supervision over the behavior of people serving punishment not related to imprisonment.

 

It turned out that the current legislation regulations do not define an obligation to inform the probation service of the competent body supervising the behavior of people serving punishment not related to imprisonment regarding detection of wanted people. To this end there are cases when the wanted person is found by the competent body, represented to the court, although the probation service remains not aware of detection of the convict.

 

So, after being found or presented to the court, the convict may not appear to that service, and the latter, because of not having information on finding the convict, does not take appropriate measures of supervision over his/her behavior. In other words, due to the legislative gap, there is a real risk that the convict's behavior may be out of sight of the probation service.

 

Besides, according to Article 434.1 of the RA Criminal Procedure Code, the court has the right to announce the search for the convict who avoids serving the sentence through the mediation of the competent body supervising the convict's behavior. One of the problems is the fact that the legislator has mentioned the word "punishment" in this article, while supervision is not considered as a punishment.  

 

The RA Prosecutor General’s Office has developed a proposal for the draft amendment to the Article 4341  of the RA Criminal Procedure Code, which was sent to the RA Ministry of Justice.

 

According to the proposed amendment after detecting the wanted people serving punishment not related to imprisonment, the competent body should present the letter to the probation service no later than during 48 hours, informing about it the court in written form.

 

In this way the probation service will be informed which itself will be able to fully fulfill his responsibilities of supervision over the convict's behavior.

 

Besides, it was suggested to define that the court has the right to start search not only in case of serving punishment but also toward the convict avoiding supervision, which will put end to the different comments of the terms of law.