Vol 12, No 3 (2025)

The paper discusses the key challenges, trends, and institutional constraints affecting how Russia taxes its current digital economy. The paper is focused on two emerging segments, including digital service aggregator platforms and cryptocurrency transactions, as new sources of revenue, risks, and opportunities for public finance. The study compares Russian laws with international practices (EU, US) and provides in-depth quantitative evaluations of the shadow economy’s magnitude, the scale of fiscal shortfalls, and the potential increase in tax revenues resulting from their decriminalization. Effective tax rates were calculated based on the current progressive personal income taxation, the income structure of contractors, and features of the digital market. The author models the fiscal effects of integrating cryptocurrency transactions into the national taxation system and estimates possible thresholds. The paper substantiates the need for a smart fiscal management model using big data, artificial intelligence algorithms, and automated systems to exchange information between platforms and the Federal Tax Service. The findings allow to develop proposals for updating legal definitions and data transfer regulations, promoting voluntary legalization, and developing a strategy to reform the taxation system aimed at sustainably expanding the revenue base and regulating public finances in the Russian Federation.

The paper delves into the legal challenges brought against regulations before the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation under the Code of Administrative Procedure. The main idea is that, even though the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation is seeing a growing number of applicants submitting file administrative claims, the proportion of those claims that are sustained is remarkably small. This emphasizes that the legal system requires further refinement to provide stronger protection for the rights of individuals and companies. The author highlights several key points to explain the small proportion of sustained claims. Primarily, this is due to procedural and legal barriers encountered when attempting to challenge a regulation. The Supreme Court of the Russian Federation often rejects to consider administrative claims when they do not adhere to the formal provisions of Article 209 of the Code of Administrative Procedure of the Russian Federation. These provisions include a clear indication of the contested parts of the regulation and their inconsistency with regulations of greater legal force. Interestingly, when a regulation is successfully challenged, such cases establish precedents helping refine legislation and law enforcement practices. The paper offers illustrative case laws, demonstrating both successful and unsuccessful attempts to challenge a regulation. Based on the analysis of these case laws, the author proposes recommendations for improving legislation, including the need to expand the explanations in the resolution of the Plenum of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation on the partial challengeability of a regulation. This would allow claimants to better safeguard their rights by invalidating both specific words or phrases in a regulation and its extension to certain categories of subjects of legal relations. The paper highlights the necessity of enhancing legislation and the relative explanations to dismantle procedural barriers and bolster the protections afforded to rights and freedoms of individuals in Russia.

The paper delves into legal mechanisms that shape the discretionary powers of public authorities in relation to the existing conflict of a demand for freedom of discretion for effective administration and the risk of its abuse. The author examines discretion in law-making (legislation, judicial and administrative rule-making) and law enforcement (individual and tacit acts, public law contracts) practices. The paper focuses on specific forms of discretion, including judicial control over discretion legality and delegation of powers. The paper identifies and analyzes constitutional principles limiting discretion authorities (legal certainty, proportionality, maintaining individuals’ trust in the law and public authorities, and consistent legal regulation). The analysis of case law identifies the criteria of the legality of discretionary decisions and actions (reasonableness, necessity, and legitimate purpose). The study was based on the works of Russian constitutional and administrative law scholars. The methods included dialectic, formal legal, and comparative legal approaches, allowing to consider the development of discretion and the relationship between their form and content. The author concludes that discretion as a requisite of responsibility requires institutionalization, which implies formalization of its types, procedures, and scope as a necessary condition for preventing abuse, ensuring a balance between private and public interests, and increasing the performance of public administration.

The Russian judicial system holds a central position today in guaranteeing adherence to law and order and protecting the rights of individuals and companies. One of the most pressing issues that has a significant impact on the efficiency and quality of justice is the high caseload of judges. This situation both demands diligence from the judges and has a direct bearing on the quality of civil and administrative proceedings, which shall be fair, prompt, and accessible to the entire society. In a world where the number of administrative cases and civil disputes increases daily and legal relations become more complex, the balance between the caseload of judges and the quality of proceedings is becoming increasingly important. The high caseload of judges results in several detrimental effects, including procedural formalism, longer trials, lower attention to detail, and subsequent errors in judgement. These problems shatter public trust in the judicial system and cast doubt on whether fundamental legal tenets, such as adversarial proceedings, equality of arms, legality, and fairness are truly being upheld. This paper discusses the general approach to conciliation in civil and administrative proceedings as a way to optimize the caseload of judges in the Russian Federation and the impact of the relative procedures on the quality of proceedings. It also analyzes the reasons for the high caseload of courts, the consequences for parties to the proceedings, and possible solutions. The paper addresses measures that help optimizing the litigation, including the introduction of advanced technologies, alternative dispute resolution methods, and the improvement of the legal framework.

The paper scrutinizes the historical evolution of extradition as a legal concept in Russian and international law, pinpoints shortcomings in current legal regulation, and suggests the conceptualization and incorporation of the concept of a political offence in the European Convention on Extradition. The study revealed that legal regulations of matters related to filing requests for extradition of individuals to the Russian Federation for criminal prosecution and sentence enforcement are insufficient. As a result, investigators lack a clear understanding of the course of action in the event when extradition is required and do not have the skills required to draw up relevant procedural documents. It has been proposed to draft and pass a law on extradition. This will eliminate legal gaps, streamline the request procedure, and establish a list of required documents and powers of investigative authorities. We consider it essential to make and officially establish a list of bodies of crimes provided by the criminal laws of the Russian Federation for which a perpetrator hiding in a foreign state may be subjected to extradition. It is crucial to amend regulatory provisions by limiting political grounds for refusing extradition and introducing liability for breaching the international treaties. Strengthening the legal framework will contribute to higher performance of law enforcement cooperation and fewer cases of unreasonable extradition refusals.