On the proactivity and strategic planning of prosecutorial activities

Karpysheva Yuliya Olegovna ORCID: 0000-0003-1111-0662 PhD in Law Associate Professor of Department of Prosecutor's supervision and Prosecutor's participation in civil and arbitration cases, Irkutsk Law Institute Affiliated with the University of the Prosecutor’s Office of the Russian Federation 664035, Russia, Irkutsk region, Irkutsk, Shevtsova str., 1 jillianr@mail.ru Other publications by this author

The emergence of new and strengthening of existing threats to the Russian state, including from unfriendly countries, contributes to the development of new approaches to the implementation of activities by state and municipal authorities. A significant event in this area can be called the introduction of the strategic planning method, the foundations of which are enshrined in Federal Law No. 172-FZ dated 06/28/2014 "On Strategic Planning in the Russian Federation" (hereinafter – Law No. 172-FZ). In the explanatory note to the draft law, which was subsequently transformed into Law No. 172-FZ, it was noted that its main idea is "to create a legal basis for the development, construction and functioning of an integrated system of state strategic planning in the field of socio-economic development and ensuring national security of the Russian Federation, which allows solving the tasks of improving the quality of life of the population, the growth of the Russian Federation the economy and ensuring the security of the country."

Strategic planning in Law No. 172-FZ refers to the activities of strategic planning participants in setting goals, forecasting, planning and programming the socio-economic development of the Russian Federation, its subjects and municipalities, economic sectors, spheres of state and municipal administration, as well as ensuring the national security of the Russian Federation.

The basis for the functioning of the strategic planning system is the development and implementation of relevant documents, which are "documented information developed, reviewed and approved (approved) by state authorities of the Russian Federation, state authorities of constituent entities of the Russian Federation, local governments and other participants in strategic planning."

Perhaps one of the most striking examples of using the strategic planning method is the implementation of national projects, the development of which is based on national goals and targets to be achieved in the socio-economic development of the country in accordance with Presidential Decrees No. 204 dated 05/07/2018 "On National Goals and Strategic Objectives of the Development of the Russian Federation for the period up to 2024 of the year", dated 07/21/2020 No. 474 "On the National Development Goals of the Russian Federation for the period up to 2030" (this decree of the President of Russia has become invalid, however, taking into account its provisions, national projects were implemented until 2024) and dated 05/27/2024 No. 309 "On the National Development Goals of the Russian Federation for the period up to 2030 and for the prospect until 2036."

Representatives of the scientific community also draw attention to the change in approaches to public administration. Thus, T. V. Shchukina notes that "currently, the state initiates projects, offers concepts for solving strategic tasks of the development of the Russian Federation and socio-economic problems. It invites public sector structures, private business and public sector organizations to resolve them, bringing everyone together in order to find internal resources to achieve their goals. Provides 90% financing of projects from the federal budget. In this case, strict control over the expenditure of budgetary resources is necessary, both from the state and from society" ^{[1, p. 38]}.

This statement seems justified. Taking into account the importance of the tasks set by the state and the need for vigilant control over the use of budget funds allocated for the implementation of national projects, as well as the actual achievement of the goals set by the President of Russia, the Prosecutor General issued an order on March 14, 2019 "On the organization of prosecutorial supervision over the implementation of legislation in the implementation of national projects" (hereinafter – Order of the State Duma of the Russian Federation No. 192) In which lower-level prosecutors are focused on the need to ensure systematic and effective supervisory support for the implementation of national projects, appropriate supervision is named one of the priorities of the prosecutor's office.

Later, in 2023, speaking at the 21st meeting of the Prosecutors General of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization member states with a report on the specifics of prosecutorial supervision of the implementation of laws in the implementation of national projects, the Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation noted that one of the tasks facing the Prosecutor's Office of Russia is "first of all, the prevention of violations, including including through the organization of proactive supervision" ^[2].

The terms "supervisory support" and "proactive supervision" are new to prosecutorial activities. And if a number of positions have already been formed by representatives of the scientific community regarding the essence and features of supervisory supervision ^{[3, 4]}, then research on the features of proactive prosecutorial supervision has not been carried out to date.

At the same time, quite a lot has already been said about the proactivity of management activities. "Proactivity" is periodically mentioned in reports by senior officials of the country ^{[5, 6]}, this term began to be used in legislation, in particular it is mentioned in federal law No. 210-FZ dated 07/27/2010 "On the organization of the provision of state and municipal services", is periodically used in scientific works. However, interestingly, the legislator does not provide the concept of proactivity in regulatory legal acts (only an analogy with such a concept as pre-emption is defined), while representatives of the scientific community consider proactivity in various fields of management (in relation to economics, national security, jurisprudence) and psychology ^{[7, 8, 9, 10]}.

For example, V. V. Chistyukhin defines proactivity as "behavior expressed in readiness to act actively and independently, as well as to carry out specific activities that determine the achievement of set goals, the ability to plan and adjust their actions based on the current situation and changing circumstances" ^{[10, p. 67]}. O. A. Anikeeva and V. V. Sizikova notes that the term "proactivity" is used in psychological sciences and refers to a model of personality behavior that actively relates to the surrounding social environment, is able to recognize dangers and risks, understands its responsibility and makes decisions that help in overcoming a difficult life situation, and does not shift responsibility to others or circumstances ^[11]. In an article devoted to the problems of ensuring national security, E. G. Nikitenko, I. M. Sinitsyn, N. A. Sergeev call proactivity strategic and define it as "the ability of the national security system, using mechanisms of strategic foresight, to take measures to stop sources of challenges and threats in advance, on the one hand, and purposefully create favorable conditions for their own growth and development – on the other hand." At the same time, situationality, otherwise called reactivity, is contrasted with stratagemism, which is the ability of the national security system to respond promptly to flows of poorly predicted external and internal challenges and threats, on the one hand, and to use the emerging favorable conditions for the growth and development of the country, on the other ^{[7, p. 56]}.

Interestingly, the works of foreign authors are also devoted to proactivity. For example, Stephen R. Covey ^[12], talking about proactivity, distinguished the so-called circle of influence and circle of concerns. The circle of concerns includes circumstances that an ordinary person cannot influence (for example, the economic and/or political situation in the country, natural phenomena). The circle of influence includes circumstances on which, on the contrary, influence is possible (for example, the level of education and the direction of training, the establishment of interpersonal relationships). A proactive person concentrates his forces on the circle of influence, changing circumstances in his life that cause or can cause discomfort, a reactive person focuses on factors beyond his control or momentary circumstances that do not affect the state of affairs as a whole ^[13].

Thus, it seems that proactivity is a certain property of the organization of activities: the ability to set priorities correctly, define goals, predict possible problems in achieving goals and take timely measures to neutralize them, act ahead of the curve using available resources. In other words, it is the ability to develop a strategy for action in the long term. All of the above fully applies to the organization of the prosecutor's supervisory activities.

At the same time, in accordance with Article 21 of Federal Law No. 2202-1 dated 17.01.1992 "On the Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation" (hereinafter – the Law on the Prosecutor's Office), the subject of supervision over the execution of laws is compliance with the Constitution of the Russian Federation and the enforcement of laws in force on its territory by bodies, organizations and persons supervised by the prosecutor, as well as compliance with laws legal acts issued by them. At the same time, the verification of the implementation of laws is carried out on the basis of information received by the prosecutor's office on violations of laws requiring the prosecutor to take action, if this information cannot be confirmed or refuted without conducting the specified verification.

Based on the above, the question arises how proactive (or proactive) supervision can be carried out if such supervision should be aimed at preventing violations, in other words, the violation has not yet occurred, but it is already necessary to check and take measures.

It seems that there are no fundamental contradictions in this case. If we consider proactivity as a property of the organization of supervisory activities, then proactive supervision will be, which is appropriately organized and aimed at timely action in cases where some violations of the law have already been committed and responding to them is necessary, including to prevent more serious violations of the law in the long term.

Prevention of violations is an integral part of the prosecutor's activity, which has already been discussed quite a lot in the scientific literature ^{[14, 15, 16]}. Such measures of the prosecutor's response as a warning about the inadmissibility of violating the law, the prosecutor's protest are clearly preventive in nature. Article 24 of the Law on the Prosecutor's Office provides for the adoption of measures by the supervised person to whom the submission was made to eliminate not only the violations of the law themselves, but also the causes and conditions that contributed to them. Paragraph 7.6 of the Order of the Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation dated 06.12.2007 No. 195 "On the organization of prosecutorial supervision of the execution of laws, observance of human and civil rights and freedoms" (hereinafter – the Order of the State Duma of the Russian Federation No. 195) instructs prosecutors to focus on the priority of tasks for the prompt elimination of violations of laws, human and civil rights and freedoms, causes and conditions conducive to them. Paragraph 16 of the Order of the State Duma of the Russian Federation No. 195 draws attention to the need in the documents of the prosecutor's response to set out the legal essence, as well as the negative consequences of violations of the law, the reasons and conditions that contributed to this.

Thus, when detecting violations during the verification of the execution of laws, the prosecutor should pay attention to those circumstances that served as the causes and conditions for the occurrence of such, and taking measures of the prosecutor's response to demand their elimination.

At the same time, one should not forget about such important components of the organization of the prosecutor's work as information and analytical activities and planning and forecasting inextricably linked to it.

Information and analytical activities are one of the most important areas in the organization of the work of the prosecutor's office of all levels. It is based on an analysis of the state of legality, which is understood as the state of affairs with crime and violations of laws of a non-criminal nature ^{[17, p. 47]}.

The state of legality is characterized by a set of quantitative and qualitative indicators reflecting the actual fulfillment of the requirements of the law in the studied time intervals. The state of crime is characterized by a set of quantitative and qualitative indicators reflecting, for each period under study (in relation to the basic values selected for analysis), the situation of non-compliance with prohibitions established by law by committing criminally punishable acts of varying severity ^[18].

To obtain a reliable picture of the state of affairs in a particular sphere of public life, the prosecutor must work to establish the state of delinquency in the region (country) of a criminal, administrative, civil-tort nature, structure, dynamics, patterns of development of these processes, factors determining their commission, circumstances contributing to them ^[18].

Analyzing the state of legality, the prosecutor considers the problem as a whole, and not by individual sectors, as, for example, control and supervisory authorities do. The task of the prosecutor is to assess the results of law enforcement for the presence of legal gaps, difficulties in implementing the norms of the law, etc. In addition, he will evaluate violations in this area detected by the control (supervision) bodies, as well as measures taken to neutralize them, and study judicial practice (both civil law and the practice of criminal courts). The result of such work, as a rule, is to determine the main trends in the development of certain processes, which allows making certain forecasts of the development of the state of legality in order to develop a strategy for prosecutorial activities.

Having gained an idea of the trends in the development of both positive and negative phenomena in a particular sphere of public life, the prosecutor determines the most relevant areas of his activity in order to ensure an operational impact on factors negatively affecting the state of legality in the supervised territory ^[19]. For example, while overseeing the implementation of laws on the implementation of national projects, the prosecutor may state that there are problems with the execution of state/municipal contracts for the construction of social facilities due to poor-quality preparation of design estimates and/or allocation by the municipality of "problematic" land plots (swampy, with difficult terrain, with a close location of groundwater, and If the problem with the development of documentation is typical for a specific project organization, then there is every reason, taking into account information about the state of legality, to plan and conduct its verification. If violations of the law are detected in the activities of such an organization, the adoption of prosecutorial response measures should also affect the causes and conditions of their occurrence, thereby preventing the recurrence of such facts, improving the quality of design estimates and reducing the number of problems with the construction of social facilities in the future. If there is a problem with land plots, then, based on the same information about the state of legality, the prosecutor also checks local governments and takes measures against them.

In other words, the prosecutor, having comprehensive information about the development of the situation, has more opportunities to influence it comprehensively, even if not completely eliminating negative factors, but taking measures to reduce them, and in the absence of authority, informs the competent authorities about the detected problem and possible ways to solve it (for example, when a gap is identified in the legislation and the difficulties arising in this regard, the prosecutor sends the relevant information to the bodies with legislative initiative). The examples given of using the results of the analysis of the state of legality are not exhaustive.

As already noted, taking into account the information obtained in the course of information and analytical activities, forecasting of the development of the situation in the supervised territory and beyond, as well as planning further activities of the prosecutor, is carried out.

In science, forecasting is considered as a separate independent management function. With regard to the activities of the prosecutor's office, the objectives of forecasting are: to reduce the degree of uncertainty of managerial situations; an idea of the possible consequences of management decisions. Predictive information and forecasts based on it make it possible to make a choice of optimal management decisions ^{[20, pp. 47-48]}.

In addition, it is noted that a comprehensive and in-depth forecast, organized under the direct supervision of the prosecutor: helps to find problematic situations, the solution of which can be provided in the plan, thereby contributes to the clarification of planned tasks; allows you to characterize a variety of acceptable development trajectories, around one of which the plan is then detailed, i.e. thanks to the forecasting process, it becomes possible to fix a number of limitations that are essential when drawing up a plan; allows you to anticipate some indirect consequences of the implementation of the plan, the characteristics of which are not an integral part of the latter, and thereby evaluate the option of a planned solution or its individual components for a very diverse range of factors. Planning actually penetrates into the field of forecasting, since making a high-quality forecast is possible only with effective information and analytical work ^{[20, pp. 47-48]}.

Thus, in order to carry out proactive prosecutorial supervision, a transition from conventional planning to strategic planning of the prosecutor's office is necessary. In this case, it is logical to refer to the provisions of Law No. 172-FZ, which prescribes the features of such. First, as noted above, strategic planning is based on an in-depth analysis of the information received on the state of legality in the supervised territory and forecasting further developments in the situation. Secondly, strategic planning is based on goal-setting, and strategic planning documents should have a certain structure – the goal to be achieved by implementing the plan, the tasks that will contribute to achieving the goals, a list of activities that need to be completed to solve the identified tasks, resources for the implementation of activities and performance indicators to track effectiveness the activities carried out, the solution of the tasks set and the achievement of the set goal.

It seems that, in general, it is not easy to make the prosecutor's office's work plan strategic, since its activities are large-scale, and it will be difficult to describe all the nuances in all directions in a single document. In this regard, it seems possible to draw up strategic plans for specific areas of activity, with the introduction of specific verification and other measures already from them into the work plan of the prosecutor's office. For example, when developing a strategic plan for the supervision of the implementation of laws in the implementation of national projects, the prosecutor must determine what goals he seeks to achieve during the implementation of this plan. We believe that for the given example, the goal may be the proper execution of state/municipal contracts in the supervised territory. Next, the tasks that need to be solved in order to achieve the goal are determined. At the same time, an important factor is that the tasks set must be solved at the level at which they are formulated. Only in this case, the impact on them can be considered proactive. These can be defined as ensuring the timely execution of the contract, the quality of work performed, services rendered, the immutability of their cost, and the achievement of socio-economic results. Next, measures are formulated to solve each of the tasks, taking into account the problems identified during the analysis that are specific to a particular territory, for example, to ensure the timely execution of a contract, it is possible to schedule an audit of local governments for the implementation of legislation on the contract system (in terms of conducting competitive procedures, selecting suppliers, the content and terms of contracts, the legality and timeliness of their payment, etc.), land and urban planning legislation (when allocating land plots, developing or changing territorial planning documents, providing permits, etc.), and other legislation if necessary. It is also possible to conduct inspections against contractors for their reliability, which can be done without interaction with the person being checked, and therefore without making a decision on conducting an inspection, using various information resources ^{[21, 22]}, etc. At the same time, the planned measures must also be feasible at a specific level – the prosecutor must have the appropriate competence, have the necessary personnel, technical capabilities, and established interaction with state and municipal authorities. As for performance indicators, they should also be indicated in the plan and include certain results, by which it will be possible to judge the improvement of the state of legality in the chosen direction. Among these may be a decrease in the number of contracts for which deadlines have been violated, the exclusion of certain negative factors that cause such deadlines to be delayed (for example, poorly conducted engineering surveys, which subsequently require reworking the project and spending additional budget funds), etc.

Regarding performance indicators, T. V. Shchukina notes that currently assessment methods have become widespread in public administration, which have become an integral part of the content of management activities and one of the main functions of public administration ^{[1, p. 39]}.

Thus, speaking about the proactivity of prosecutorial supervision, we can come to the following conclusions – supervision will be proactive only in the case of strategic planning of the prosecutor's activities based on the results of an analysis of the state of legality in the supervised territory, as well as conducting systematic work to influence the causes and conditions of detected violations, in order to prevent not only those, but also violations, entailing more serious consequences in the future.

At the same time, the prosecutor's activity is often characterized by reactivity (situationality), that is, solving current, momentary tasks that are not able to positively affect the general trends in the development of the situation both in the supervised territory and in the entire country as a whole. The volume of planned work for prosecutors is large, but much more time and effort is spent annually on a variety of unscheduled tasks and assignments, which does not allow proper concentration on planned, strategically important events. In one of the already mentioned works on national security problems, it is noted that focusing on current challenges, threats and dangers leads to a decrease in attention to solving strategic forecasting and planning tasks, which, as a result, leads to mistakes in making operational decisions, which become sources of new challenges and threats ^{[7, p. 58]}. At the same time, it is obvious that it is impossible and impractical to completely exclude reactivity (situationality) from the activities of state and municipal bodies. No matter how accurate the forecast of further developments is, unforeseen circumstances in the form of a natural or man-made disaster, a terrorist act, military operations, etc. can always interfere with it. In this case, the developed long-term strategic planning will not help much, it is necessary to react quickly and precisely to immediately eliminate a sudden threat or minimize possible damage in this regard. In such circumstances, the principle of reactivity is indispensable.

Taking into account the above, it can be concluded that there is a need for a reasonable symbiosis of proactivity and reactivity in the activities of both state and municipal bodies and in the activities of the Prosecutor's Office of Russia. In general, such activities should be proactive and based on strategic planning and proactive work, while reactivity should be used if necessary in the event of such a need.