1. Failure to provide assistance to a patient without good reason by a person obligated to provide it in accordance with the law or with a special rule, if this negligently resulted in the infliction of moderate harm to the health of the patient, -
shall be punishable by a fine in the amount of up to forty thousand rubles, or in the amount of the wages or other income of the convicted person for a period of up to three months, or by compulsory labor for a term of up to three hundred and sixty hours, or by corrective labor for a term of up to one year, or by arrest for a term of up to four months.
2. The same act, if it negligently entailed the death of a patient or the infliction of grievous harm to his health, -
shall be punishable by forced labor for a term of up to four years with deprivation of the right to hold certain positions or engage in certain activities for a term of up to three years or without it, or by imprisonment for a term of up to four years with deprivation of the right to hold certain positions or engage in certain activities for a term of up to three years, or without one.
- Article 123. Illegal abortion
- Article 124.1. Obstruction of medical care
Commentary to Art. 124 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation
The object of failure to provide assistance is social relations that ensure health safety. The law directly identifies the victim of a crime as the patient. According to the law, a patient in this case should be recognized as any person who objectively needed medical care and a) specifically applied for its provision; b) underwent a routine examination; c) to whom medical assistance was provided without his consent; d) found himself in a situation requiring urgent medical intervention (for example, in a car accident). Moreover, from a medical point of view, the victim may not actually be sick (for example, pregnant women, women in labor).
The objective side of the crime in question is characterized by the inaction of the subject (failure to provide assistance), which is in a causal relationship with the resulting consequence in the form of moderate harm to health. Material composition; the crime is over from the moment the consequences occur.
It is important to emphasize that the article provides for liability for failure to provide medical assistance to the victim. Due to this, refusal to provide other types of assistance (psychological, social, material, etc.), as well as failure to provide illegal assistance (for example, a justified refusal to provide narcotic drugs to a drug addict), even in the presence of socially dangerous consequences, cannot be qualified under Art. . 124 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation.
Failure to provide assistance to a patient can be expressed in the following forms: failure of a medical worker to appear when called, refusal to admit a patient to a hospital, failure to provide inpatient care in a medical institution, failure to call a specialist by an obligated person who turned out to be incompetent in a particular situation, etc. The act is pure inaction. If the subject provided assistance to the patient, albeit in an inappropriate manner, liability under Art. 124 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation is excluded; in these cases, it is possible to qualify the act under other articles on liability for intentional or careless infliction of harm to health.
A prerequisite for liability for failure to provide assistance to a patient is the absence of valid reasons for the subject’s criminal behavior. Good reasons should be understood, first of all, as circumstances that exclude the criminality of the act (extreme necessity, physical or mental coercion, execution of an order or instruction); as well as other external circumstances in the form of force majeure (lack of transport, lack of instruments and medications, etc.) or subjective factors (illness of the medical worker himself, inconsistency of psychophysiological qualities with extreme conditions or neuropsychic overload, etc.). In particular, references to non-working hours, fatigue, departmental or private (non-state) nature of the medical institution, etc. cannot be recognized as valid.
To qualify the crime, it is also important to establish that the subject did not provide exactly the assistance that he should have provided, taking into account his qualifications in a particular situation. To establish the procedure for providing medical care, you should refer to the regulations of executive authorities (for example, the Decree of the Government of the Russian Federation of September 1, 2005 N 546 approved the Rules for the provision of medical care to foreign citizens on the territory of the Russian Federation).
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NW RF. 2005. N 36. Art. 3708.
The consequence of the crime is harm to health of moderate severity. It is important that when assessing the severity of harm to health caused to a person suffering from any disease, only the consequences of guilty actions are taken into account; in this case, it is necessary to determine the impact of the injury on the disease (exacerbation of the disease, its transition to a more severe form, etc.). It is advisable to resolve this issue by a commission of experts with the participation of relevant clinical specialists.
A mandatory element of the crime in question is a causal connection. To establish a causal relationship between failure to provide assistance and harm to health, it is necessary to take into account the nature of the disease, the patient’s condition and other circumstances (in some cases, a forensic medical examination is necessary to establish them). If the provision of assistance could not objectively prevent the onset of consequences in the form of harm to health, liability under Art. 124 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation is excluded.
From the subjective side, failure to provide assistance to a patient is characterized by a careless form of guilt in the form of frivolity or negligence. It seems that, due to the characteristics of the subject of this crime, the content of guilt includes the guilty person’s awareness of the social danger and the illegality of his own behavior.
A special subject of a crime is a sane individual who has reached the age of sixteen and is obliged to provide medical care in accordance with the law or a special rule. In particular, the subject of the crime under Art. 124 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, there may be not only doctors by training, but also other medical personnel whose duties included providing assistance to the patient. Persons of non-medical specialties (for example, police officers, rescuers of the Ministry of Emergency Situations, etc.) can also be the subject of a crime.
The law recognizes as a qualified crime the failure to provide assistance that, through negligence, resulted in the infliction of grievous bodily harm or death. The object of this crime is social relations that ensure the safety of human life. From crimes provided for in Part 2 of Art. 109 and part 2 of Art. 118 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, the act in question is distinguished by the characteristics of the subject and the specific characteristics of the objective side, and the relevant norms are correlated as general and special.
Sick or patient
The criminal law norm uses the concept of “sick”, while the Federal Law of November 21, 2011 No. 323-FZ “On the fundamentals of protecting the health of citizens in the Russian Federation” (hereinafter referred to as the Law on the fundamentals of protecting the health of citizens) does not provide for an identical term , the word patient is used in conjunction with any disease (a patient with tuberculosis, a patient with drug addiction, a patient with hemophilia) or used as a designation of the degree of the disease (terminally ill). The federal law, in contrast to the criminal code, uses a different basic concept - “patient”, which is an individual receiving medical care or who has applied for medical care, regardless of whether he has a disease or his condition.
However, this does not create obstacles to criminal proceedings; from the point of view of criminal law, the concept of “patient” is broader than the generally accepted understanding and includes the category of persons who fit the concept of “patient”
. Current practice implies that the concept of “sick” includes both persons with illnesses and those who have been injured, women in need of prenatal care and obstetric care, as well as newborns and other categories of persons.
Judicial practice under Article 124 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation
Determination of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation dated April 20, 2017 N 835-O
1. In his complaint to the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation, citizen S.V. Batskikh, convicted and serving a sentence for committing a crime, argues that the provisions of Articles 1, 5 - 8, 9 - 11, 14, 15, 17, 20, 21, 24, 25, 27, 29, 46, 47, 49 - 51 , 53, 57, 58, 61, 73 - 75, 79 - 81, 83, 85, 87 - 92, 124, 125, 152, 156, 157, 162 - 168, 170 - 174, 177 - 181, 190, 192 , 194, 202, 208, 212, 217 - 222, 227, 229, 234, 237, 244 - 247, 249, 251, 254, 259, 260, 270, 271, 278, 281, 282, 284, 285, 3 07 , 389.11 - 389.17, 389.19, 389.20, 389.22, 389.31, 389.34, 389.36, 397, 401.14 - 401.16, 412.9, 413, 415 and 418 Code of Criminal Procedure of the Russian Federation and chapters 21 - 24 of this Code, Article 124 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, as well as paragraph 14 of the resolution of the Plenum of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation dated March 5, 2004 N “On the application by courts of the norms of the Criminal Procedure Code of the Russian Federation” and paragraph 2 of the resolution of the Plenum of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation dated June 27, 2013 N “On the application by courts of legislation regulating the grounds and procedure exemption from criminal liability" his rights guaranteed by Articles 2, 15, 18 - 20, 22 - 25, 41, 45 - 50, 52, 118, 120 and 123 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation were violated.
Appeal ruling of the Judicial Collegium for Criminal Cases of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation dated 03/06/2019 N 85-APU19-1
convicted under Part 2 of Art. 124 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation for 2 years of suspended imprisonment with a probationary period of 2 years, with deprivation of the right to engage in medical activities related to childbirth for 2 years; Vasilyeva Tatyana Leonidovna, ... unconvicted,
Resolution of the Presidium of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation dated May 26, 2021 N 174-P20
By the resolution of the senior investigator of the investigative department for the Trusovsky district of Astrakhan, the investigative department of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation for the Astrakhan region dated November 8, 2013, it was refused to initiate a criminal case against employees of the criminal investigation department of police department No. ... Regional Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia for the city of Astrakhan and against employees special rapid response squad of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia for the Astrakhan region for the absence of corpus delicti in the act under Art. Art. 285, 286 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, according to the statements of Tyurin Yu.Yu. and Tyurina R.Yu. about unlawful actions of law enforcement officers. In initiating a criminal case against employees of the municipal health care unit of the City Clinical Hospital N... named after. Kirov was denied due to the absence of corpus delicti in their actions under Art. Art. 124, 125 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation.
Criminal liability
For inaction, the article in question regulates several types of punishment. The main factor determining the degree is the severity of the consequences, as well as the level of damage caused. In other words, it is impossible to say unambiguously what measure a physician can apply. The specifics are given below.
- Fines. It may seem that only in Russia can a court impose a fine for inaction towards a person in need of help. Sometimes such a measure is truly acceptable. The exact figure will be stated in the verdict; the law only limits the maximum amount, which is 40 thousand rubles, or three salaries.
- Public Works. Another very common phenomenon in our country. If a person has suffered moderate harm, we can say with confidence that the doctor will be assigned to undergo either compulsory or correctional work. The duration of the first is 360 hours (15 days), although practice shows that this period is usually increased to one month. Accordingly, the second category provides for a punishment of up to 1 year.
- Arrest. Although the measure exists, its practical application is extremely rare. The maximum duration is no more than four months. In most cases, we are talking about two weeks for failure to provide medical care, even despite the regulations of Article 124, which indicate a two-month period.
Harm to health
If, as a result of inaction, the victim suffered serious damage or died, the court will also add to the financial compensation:
- prison term. Duration - up to three years;
- recognition of the license as invalid with excommunication from medical activities;
- imposing a ban on holding certain positions.
Where to complain
Few people know who to contact if a citizen’s legal powers have been violated. The options are as follows:
- hospital management;
- local representative office of the Health Department;
- Compulsory Medical Insurance Fund;
- Ministry of Health
At the same time, you need to submit an application to the court, attaching to it a complete list of documents confirming the harm caused as a result of inaction. It is recommended to add links to related legislation to the text.
How to write a complaint correctly
Add information about the doctor and the hospital where he works to the text. Attach your own data, try to describe in as much detail as possible the circumstances under which assistance was not provided. Indicate in detail the list of health problems that were of concern at the time of admission, what actions were taken, if any were taken in principle.
