Moral Foundations of Criminal Procedure Activities under the Statute of Criminal Procedure of 1864

The author examines the norms of the Statute of Criminal Procedure of 1864 with the purpose of establishing their moral foundations. The interest to this topic is conditioned by the following factors: the year 2024 is the anniversary year for the Statute (160 years since the adoption of one of the basic normative legal acts of the court reform of Aleksander II); the relevance of historical milestones of the establishment and development of Russian law in the modern conditions; the relevance of the topic of moral foundations in criminal proceedings whose development trends cannot be studied without the knowledge about their historical path. In the paper, the moral foundations are examined from the standpoint of criminal procedure activities and broken into groups to include clauses of the justice of criminal prosecution, the observance of the rights of criminal procedure participants, the conditions and procedure of the preliminary investigation and the court hearing, court costs, specifics of executing punishments and others. At the end the author draws conclusions regarding the moral foundations of the examined clauses of the Statute of Criminal Procedure of 1864 because it was due to this normative act that Russian criminal proceedings acquired a strong moral basis.