Government Proposes to Postpone Launch of National Crime Monitoring System by One Year

The Russian government has submitted draft law No. 8156-8 to the State Duma, proposing to postpone the launch of the State Automated System for Crime Statistics (GAS PS) until January 1, 2023. The decree to create this system was signed by President Vladimir Putin in 2019. According to the decree, all data on crime and investigative activities will be included in a unified legal statistics system managed by the Prosecutor General’s Office.

The document signed by Putin established the foundations for creating and operating a national unified statistical system for data on crime rates, crime reports, investigative work, inquiries, and prosecutorial oversight. This information will be published online as open data, but with restrictions set by law. The list of data to be published will be approved by the Prosecutor General in coordination with other federal agencies that provide the information. The law was originally scheduled to take effect on January 1, 2022.

The explanatory note to draft law No. 8156-8 states that the Prosecutor General’s Office has carried out significant work to prepare GAS PS for launch, including the development of specialized software and the procurement of hardware and software systems.

However, under current legislation, all components of the system are now being fully migrated to domestic software included in the unified register of Russian programs. The government’s explanatory note says: “This process is technologically complex and lengthy, requires separate design, and involves revising the program code.”

At the same time, it is necessary to ensure full debugging of the integration tools between GAS PS and departmental information systems, as well as the readiness of Russian law enforcement agencies for information exchange under the new conditions.

Postponing the launch will also require delaying the start of federal agencies providing primary statistical data on crime to the Prosecutor General’s Office, as well as the publication of official statistical information by the Prosecutor General’s Office of the Russian Federation on the Internet, since these actions are only possible once GAS PS is operational.