Theoretical principles of ensuring the safety of a person who agreed to provide assistance to law enforcement agencies in Ukraine on the basis of a conspiracy
Authors: Gelemei M. O. , Kozachenko O. I. 
Published: February 2025

The legal regulation of ensuring the safety of individuals performing tasks related to operational and investigative activities within the framework of criminal proceedings is a matter of great concern. Informal cooperation with law enforcement agencies is inherently dangerous, particularly for the person who has agreed to assist in carrying out operational and investigative tasks. This is why many developed countries have special programs to protect such individuals. In Ukraine, however, this remains a serious problem, as the issue of ensuring the safety of individuals who have agreed to cooperate with law enforcement agencies under the principles of confidentiality is not adequately addressed by legislative and regulatory acts. Additionally, there is a lack of scientific foundation to develop appropriate changes and additions to the legislation or to create new normative legal acts.
Therefore, the goal of this article is to develop theoretical principles to ensure the safety of individuals who have agreed, under the principles of confidentiality, to assist law enforcement agencies in Ukraine. The implementation of the set goal involves solving a number of tasks: 1) determining the basic legal provisions that regulate and define the concepts of «security» and «ensuring security»; 2) developing relevant amendments to legislation, creating new legal acts to research specific risks to citizens’ economic security associated with a decrease in income during the imposition of martial law; 3) analyzing and defining human security in detail, including a more nuanced classification of types of such security; 4) conducting research on individual mechanisms of state regulation of the level of citizens’ economic security during the imposition of martial law.
The article, for the first time, distinguishes between measures to ensure the security of a person who has agreed, on the basis of conspiracy, to provide assistance to law enforcement agencies in preventing threats and measures to overcome them.
As a conclusion, it is proposed that measures to overcome threats to individuals should be presented not only in the norms of the Laws of Ukraine «On ensuring the safety of persons involved in criminal proceedings» and «On operational-search activity», but also in a separate chapter of the Criminal Procedure Code of Ukraine «Ensuring the safety of persons involved in criminal proceedings and engaged in carrying out its tasks». The addition of the Criminal Procedure Code of Ukraine with such a chapter should be carried out with the simultaneous improvement and «synchronization» of the provisions of the above-mentioned laws with the norms of criminal procedural legislation. This scheme could lead to a significant improvement in the state of legislative regulation of the security of various categories of individuals, including covert employees. Among other things, the mentioned chapter of the Criminal Procedure Code of Ukraine should define: grounds for applying security measures; criteria for assessing the reality of the threat (in this case, the fact of disclosing the data of a covert employee should be considered a sufficient criterion); the obligation of the investigator, prosecutor, investigative judge, court to make a decision on the application of the specified measures in necessary cases; the procedure for their application; and the entities that should take security measures.