REGULATORY REGULATION OF PERSONAL BAIL AS A PREVENTIVE MEASURE: RETROSPECTIVE AND PROSPECTIVE EXCURSIONS

Abstract

For continental law systems, the legislative process is of particular importance, as it is the main one for the formation of legal norms. Therefore, it is the norm-making process that reflects the main trends and vectors of the legislator's activity, which allows us to track the "legal evolution" of a particular legal institution. Within the framework of this study: (a) the dynamics of the formation of personal bail as a preventive measure from the 1960 Criminal Procedure Code, as the most temporally close to the currently existing criminal procedural law (retrospective excursion); (b) the development of the normative basis of personal surety in draft laws is traced (prospective excursion). A retrospective excursion into the normative regulation of personal surety allows us to assert that the foundations of this procedural institution in its current form were laid precisely in the 1960 CPC. The fundamental provisions of personal surety under the 1960 CPC still retain their validity in procedural law (albeit in a somewhat transformed form), and therefore personal surety under the 1960 CPC can be assessed as a prototype of the currently relevant criminal procedural institution. The Criminal Procedure Law adopted in 2012 consolidated the currently valid model of the institution of personal surety, preserving, on the one hand, the conceptual features of its “prototype” (under the 1960 Code of Criminal Procedure), on the other hand, improving and supplementing it with new elements, such as: changing the entity authorized to apply a preventive measure; determining the number of guarantors; introducing the possibility of single-person suretyship; establishing more complete information to the guarantor about the characteristics of criminal proceedings and the legal consequences of the suretyship; introducing a mechanism for the guarantor to refuse the obligations undertaken; differentiating criminal procedural sanctions for the guarantor’s failure to fulfill the obligations undertaken; determining the entities responsible for procedural control over the fulfillment of personal suretyship obligations.