In this paper, the issues of qualification of criminal safety violations at coal mining enterprises are discussed in detail. Firstly, a number of articles of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation for qualification of these acts are defined. The differences between articles 143 and 216 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation with the analysis of a concrete example from judicial practice are considered. A similar procedure is carried out in the course of qualifying safety violations at coal mining enterprises under article 217 of the Criminal Code. In this work, the authors do not try to justify the need to decriminalize any articles of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, but try to work with the existing legislative framework so that the qualification rules formulated in the work can be used in practice. Also the authors formulate rules for the qualifications of the violations considered in this paper and propose amendments to the Criminal Code that do not require any “revolutionary” changes. A special difficulty is that there are no scientific recommendations on the qualification of criminal safety violations at coal mining enterprises.

The paper deals with the qualification of criminal violations of safety rules in coal mining enterprises in the light of recent changes in Art. 216 and 217 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, as well as the adoption of a new Resolution of the Plenum of Supreme Court of the Russian Federation on violations of safety rules during operations. Firstly, the old and new editions of Art. 216 and 217 of the Criminal Code are compared. After that, the distinctive features of the articles under consideration are examined with the help of the new Plenum Resolution, federal laws and bylaws. Finally, the case law on this issue has been reviewed since 2016 with consideration of specific examples. In the paper, the authors do not address the issues of qualifying violations of safety rules at coal mining enterprises under Art.143 of the Criminal Code as it has not been changed. At the end of the study, the authors formulate the qualification rules taking into account the latest changes, without proposing any changes to the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation and other regulatory legal acts that do not include the Resolution of the Plenum of the Supreme Court, i.e. the results of the study can be used in practice. The problem is that there is a lack of research of the changes we are considering in the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, and even more in relation to the coal mining industry.

The article introduces the problem of socially dangerous consequences. Legal studies reveal no uniform approach to the definition of socially dangerous consequences. The author elaborates on the definition of socially dangerous consequences, describes their signs, and defines such concepts as their essence and content, as well as the object of encroachment. Socially dangerous consequences are connected with the criminal act and the object of crime, so the author describes their interdependence, mutual influence, and the derivativeness of socially dangerous consequences from the criminal act. This derivation makes it possible to transfer the signs of the criminal act to the socially dangerous consequences it causes. These signs include: public danger, social character, negativity, and objectivity. The complex of signs of socially dangerous consequences makes up their content. The characteristics of the object of encroachment and the structure of the object demonstrate a one-sided connection of socially dangerous consequences with the object of crime. The signs of socially dangerous consequences result from the signs of the object of encroachment. The author describes the signs of socially dangerous consequences derived from the object of encroachment, as well as the motives for their allocation. The features of each of the indicated signs are irremovability, measurability, heterogeneity, and multiplicity. All the above signs, derived from both the socially dangerous act and the object of crime, belong to socially dangerous consequences. The signs of socially dangerous consequences can be divided into direct and indirect, which together make up the content of the socially dangerous consequences.