MOSCOW. April 15 (Interfax) - The absence of powers for the prosecutors to open criminal cases is a major flaw, Russian Human Rights Commissioner Tatyana Moskalkova said.
"As is known, a prosecutor is not entitled to launch a criminal inquiry on his own today [...] It seems to me that this is a huge shortcoming of Article 37 of the Russian Criminal Procedure Code," Moskalkova said on the Vesti FM radio station.
"The prosecutor was stripped of these powers several years ago and it seems to me that they [prosecutors] are lacking them so that the violated right could be reinstated precisely by these instruments," she said.
"He [prosecutor] receives a complaint, he noticed that the ruling on the denial to launch a criminal inquiry was illegal, and he submits his procedural document to the investigator, in which he is demanding to overturn this ruling and open a criminal case. The investigator carries out an additional pre-investigation inquiry and again makes a decision on the denial, while the prosecutor himself cannot open a case and compel to conduct an investigation of the criminal case," Moskalkova said.
In 2011, the Investigative Committee was established as an independent institution, prior to that, the Investigative Committee has operated as part of the prosecution service since 2007.
The reform deprived prosecutors of the right to initiate criminal proceedings, as well as the right to supervise the investigation by means of compulsory orders. Prosecutors thus lost their positions as the main judiciary in the trial.