Legal personality of officials of the prosecution authorities in criminal proceedings

In modern criminal procedural science, there is no doubt that the prosecutor and subordinate prosecution officers are participants in criminal proceedings. Separate disputes arise only when discussing the issue of classifying the prosecutor as a party to the prosecution. At the same time, the role and functions of officials of the prosecution authorities in criminal proceedings are not so obvious and unambiguous. Although Part1 of Article37 of the Code of Criminal Procedure of the Russian Federation assigns the functions of supervision and criminal prosecution to the prosecutor, the heads of the prosecution authorities and the employees subordinate to them do not always pursue these goals, and officials of the prosecution authorities do not always act in the status of a prosecutor or public prosecutor. Analyzing the current norms of criminal procedural legislation and comparing them with the actual legal personality of prosecutorial employees entering into relations with participants in criminal proceedings, the author substantiates the conclusion about the necessity to distinguish between two fundamentally different legal statuses of the prosecution officials. The first one is the official status of the prosecutor as the head of the prosecution authority, allowing him to exercise state powers to supervise the preliminary investigation bodies without accepting the additional procedural status of a participant in legal proceedings. The second one is the criminal procedural status acquired by an official of the prosecution authority, including a prosecutor, for a certain period (stage, phase) of criminal proceedings to carry out one of two procedural functions – criminal prosecution (acquires the status of a public prosecutor) or law enforcement function, protection of the interests of an individual, society and the state (acquires the status of other prosecutor or a prosecutor representative).