Representative function of the public prosecutor`s office: defects of legislation
Authors: Stefanchuk M. 
Published: March 2020

The current legislative regulation of the representative function of the prosecutor’s office in Ukraine contains a number of defects, which leads to a decrease in the effectiveness of law enforcement activities and the level of protection of the rights, freedoms and legitimate interests of participants of legal relations, and therefore the social importance of the prosecutor’s office activities outside the sphere of criminal justice in Ukraine. In such circumstances, there is a scientific discourse on the feasibility of retaining the powers of the prosecutor’s office outside the sphere of criminal justice in Ukraine, since the society seeks not for process for the sake of process, but for the result, which necessitates the scientific investigation of these defects in order to eliminate their consequences in law enforcement. The purpose of the article is to analyze the legislative regulation of the prosecutor’s office outside the sphere of criminal justice in Ukraine and the practice of its application in order to identify the defects of the legislation in this field, presenting their own vision on the prospects of legal support of the prosecutor’s office in this area in accordance with the needs and resources of society, as well as introduction proposals to remedy legislative defects in order to improve its enforcement. It is established that the legislative regulation of the representative function of the prosecutor’s office contains several defects, including: the declarative nature of the powers of the prosecutor, by which he is empowered in the process of exercising the representative function, especially in the pre-trial form of its implementation; appraisal terms in the legislative regulation of relations in a particular area, such as «state interests» and «exceptional cases»; the mismatch between the language structure and the content that the legislator sought to reflect in law, the manifestation of which is the definition of the object of the public prosecutor’s office of the «interest of the state», which in some cases is understood by the jurisdictions as a public authority and distorts the defined mission of the prosecutor’s office outside the criminal justice system at the level of the European institutions; the collisions in the legislative regulation of the representative function of the prosecutor’s office, which cause legal uncertainty as to the extent of the prosecutor’s powers in its implementation; the absence of a legislative conceptual vision of the public prosecutor’s office powers outside the criminal justice sphere. It is suggested that the basis for eliminating these defects in the legislation should be the necessity to change the conceptual model of prosecutor’s activity outside the sphere of criminal justice. The main elements of this model should be the clarification of the grounds for giving the prosecutor’s office guaranteed, not declarative powers outside the sphere of criminal justice, determined by the task of protecting human rights and freedoms, the general interests of society and the state. It is clarified the author’s vision of the elimination of defects in the legislative regulation of the representative function of the prosecutor’s office in Ukraine and the prospects for further scientific investigations in this field are outlined.