Oaths in Criminal Procedure: Back to Tsarist Tools?

In criminal proceedings, oaths traditionally guaranteed the reliability and true intentions of court participants, including responsible attitude to their duties and the truthfulness and objectivity of the information they provided. However, they are absent from the modern criminal proceedings. The Russian Empire employed oaths as part of criminal proceedings and trials, but the early Soviet criminal justice system denied any religious rites in the activities of state bodies and replaced oaths with criminal liability warnings, i.e., a penal notice, to witnesses, experts, and other participants. Today, such warnings seem poorly consistent with the principle of presumption of knowledge of the criminal law. Yet, the pre-revolutionary religious oaths cannot be fully restored. However, the practice of using identical oaths has a very high preventive potential, which exceeds that of penal notice. If modified and secularized, such legal guarantees may find their way back to the sphere of criminal proceedings and trials. As for criminal liability warnings and penal notices, they should be the category of discretionary powers of inquiries, investigators, and judges to be used for tactical purposes at their own discretion.