Reasonable or objective term in criminal proceedings?

The course for the transformation of criminal proceedings held in Russia already bears certain fruit and this is stipulated by the democratic transformations taking place in the country. The prerequisite of the research of a reasonable term of criminal proceedings was the fact that the urgency of the criminal trial is of interest not only for scientists and law-makers but also for the accused, defendants, and victims, whose rights are breached in long-term criminal proceedings. The state shall guarantee the compensation of harm for the delay of terms of criminal proceedings not only to the accused and suspected but also to the victims. For this, it is necessary to use certain criteria that explain what terms should be considered reasonable. When writing the article, the authors used the methods of analysis, synthesis, logical and system approaches. As the study of the problem was performed by the authors from the point of view of the two aspects of its understanding – from the scientific point of view and administration of law, eventually the chosen methods allowed reaching the set objective of the research – to reveal the peculiarities of a reasonable term of criminal proceedings and also to develop suggestions for the improvement of legislation in the field under consideration. The authors believe that the preliminary investigation and the trial should determine the acceptable or objective term of criminal proceedings to deliver a fast, legal, and relevant judgment upholding by this the rights of all participants in the process. Basing upon the issue declared, the authors analyze the concept of a reasonable term in criminal proceedings, how it is implemented in practice, and propose to legislate the concept of the reasonable term in Article 5 of the Russian Federation Code of Criminal Procedure.

Expert Judgment Z-Numbers as a Ranking Indicator for Hierarchical Fuzzy Logic System

<p>In this article, the researchers main contribution is to investigate three factors which may correlate in implementation of Expert Judgment Z-Numbers as new Fuzzy Logic Ranking Indicator such as: expert relevance judgment or score, the expert confidence and the level of expertise. The Expert Judgment Z-Numbers then will be an input to the Hierarchical Fuzzy Logic System of Domain Specific Text Retrieval, along with other indicators such as Ontology BM25 Score, Fabrication Rate, Shia Rate and Positive Rate of hadith document. The results showed, the proposed system, with the additional new indicator of Expert Judgment Z-Numbers, may improve the original BM25 ranking function, by yielding better results on 26 queries, on all evaluation metrics that are measured in this research such as P@10, %no measures and MAP, and has achieved better results in 28 queries on P@10 alone, compared to the BM25 original score, that only yield better results in 2 queries on all evaluation metrics, and also yield better results in 4 queries on the MAP alone. The results proved that the proposed system has a capability to utilize the expert confidence and their relevant judgment that are represented in Z-Number, as an indicator to optimize the existing ranking function system and has a potential for a further research to be conducted on these domains. For the future works, the researchers would like to enhance this research by including a variety of expert’s level confidence and their judgment, also a new calculation to represent the value of Z-Numbers.</p>

What’s in a Name? Equal Treatment, Union Citizens and National Rules on Names and Titles

The construction of names and the use of nobility titles is not regulated by European Union law. Yet the Court of Justice of the EU has had to deal with such issues on various occasions where national rules on names or titles had to be contrasted with the EU law on equal treatment, Union citizenship and free movement and residence. Rules on names fall essentially within the competence of the member states, but the states have to regard EU law when exercising this competence. Our paper undertakes to analyse this issue in light of a recent relevant judgment, the Bogendorff von Wolffersdorff case, having regard also to the Court’s reasoning regarding the national constitutional identity clause [Art 4 (2)TEU]. We argue – inter alia – that the Court of Justice decided in this judgment not to favour the rights of a free-moving EU citizen (even if the judgment admittedly affects only a limited circle of individuals) and put national constitutional identity first, yet the way in which the identity clause was used by the Court is also debatable in our view.