“Unsubscription” as a Violation of the Legislation of the Russian Federation on the Procedure for Considering Citizens’ Appeals: Problem Statement

The word “unsubscription” has long been firmly used by Russian citizens, but this social phenomenon has not yet been studied in practice in legal science. In this article, the Author tried to fill this gap and analyze the nature of the replies of modern Russian officials, classify them, and identify the causes and conditions that determine them.

When preparing the article, we used methods of formal logic-comparison, description, classification, analysis, synthesis, etc., which allowed us to characterize the existing system of consideration of citizens from the position of its normative content. Among the private scientific methods, the formal-legal method used in the analysis of legal norms on consideration of appeals was used; logical-legal method, by which the content of legal norms in relation to the problem under consideration was studied; specifically, it is a sociological approach that was used in the analysis of statistical data related to the research problem.

The Author offers a classification of unsubscriptions depending on their content, the motive for writing, the circle of subjects, and the degree of multiplicity. Separately, the article analyzes formal responses with little content, sent from higher and Supervisory authorities, if the applicant applies to them after receiving a response from another authority and disagrees with it. On the example of specific unsubscriptions, we analyze options for evading inspections by law enforcement officials related to violations of the rights of citizens-applicants.

The author cites corporate rules of conduct, a desire to get rid of work, “defending the honor of the uniform”, excessive secrecy of activities, as well as the impunity of the official who prepared the response as reasons for the formal attitude to his responsibility for a comprehensive and objective review of appeals.

Take measures to prevent violations of the rights of citizens in the sphere of consideration of their applications, in particular, the introduction to the Code of the Russian Federation on Administrative offenses of article 5.59, not removed the relevance of the problem. As a rule, punishments under this article occur due to violation of the terms of consideration of appeals or even from evasion of giving a response to appeals, but the completeness and semantic load of the response itself are not studied. The author makes some suggestions for improving the effectiveness of interaction between people and authorities.

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