Russia's Interior Ministry proposed accepting police reports electronically

What the Interior Ministry proposes

Russia's Interior Ministry has prepared amendments to the ordergoverning the procedure for filing and registering reports of committed crimes, administrative offenses, and incidents. The ministry's press service announced this. The amendments concern Order No. 736 of August 29, 2014, which contains instructions for police on receiving reports of offenses.

What changes in practice

To improve the registration of crimes by duty unit officers, it is proposed to introduce an electronic system for recording such reports. The key point: currently all submissions to the Interior Ministry are accepted only in paper form, and the ministry wants applications sent electronically to have the same legal force. In other words, this is not about technical convenience, but about recognizing an electronic submission as a full-fledged basis for registering a report of an offense.

Context

In the same article, Gazeta.Ru recalls recent related decisions: Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the creation of an interagency commission on applying temporary restrictive measures to citizens evading serving their sentences outside the country, and earlier in Russia seven people were stripped of their citizenship for various crimes. These measures relate to the enforcement of sentences and are not part of the electronic applications initiative. The publication does not report on the timeline for adopting the amendments or the procedure for their implementation.