CIRCUMSTANCES TO BE INVESTIGATED, ESTABLISHED, AND IDENTIFIED AS INDEPENDENT CATEGORIES OF DOMESTIC CRIMINAL PROCEDURE LAW
Authors:   Main Investigation Department Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation for the Republic of Crimea and Sevastopol, NIKITIN V.I. 
Published: November 2024

According to the concept established in the science of criminal procedure, evidence forms the basis of the entire process, and facts are the basis for making all significant procedural decisions. It is with solutions that such important problems as legality, validity, motivation, as well as, in some cases, the fairness of the involvement of participants in criminal proceedings and the use of various forms of restriction of their rights of participants, including measures of procedural coercion, investigative actions, etc. are associated. The facts that become the material grounds for making procedural decisions are of fundamental importance, as well as the ways in which they are involved in criminal proceedings. The methods of obtaining facts have a significant impact on them, which in certain circumstances (due to the instructions of the criminal procedure law) may affect the scope of the use of facts in criminal proceedings (for example, to use them to substantiate an investigator's petition to the court for the application of a preventive measure, for an accusation or for a court order, etc.).Despite the high importance, both the facts and the ways of their involvement in criminal proceedings have theoretical and practical problems, the resolution of which can change the perception of established and familiar concepts. In the Criminal Procedure Law, various terms are used in relation to the methods of obtaining facts. Among them, we note the main ones - this is proof, identification (both appear, in particular, in Article 73, identification, in addition, is used in part 4 of Article 29, paragraph 2 of part 2 of Article 37, part 1.1 of Article 110, etc. The Criminal Procedure Code of the Russian Federation), the establishment (presented in many articles of the Criminal Procedure Code of the Russian Federation). Differences in semantic load, instability in contextual use creates the risk of making a mistake in the possibility of using certain facts, given the way they are obtained. Accordingly, the resolution of the problem of uniformity of the terminology used and the definition of the legal meaning and meaning of each concept becomes relevant. The purpose of this work is to form a uniform approach to the use of terminology and to define a common legal meaning for each of these terms - proof, establishment, identification. To achieve this goal, several tasks were solved, including comparing the content of each of the mentioned terms, as well as offering recommendations necessary for uniform legislative regulation in terms of determining ways to involve facts and their use in various areas of criminal procedural activity. Research methods: descriptive, comparative, system-structural analysis, isolation, synthesis. Results: 1) conclusions are drawn about the semantic difference between the concepts of «proof», «establishment», «identification», which allows us to talk about the need for independent legal regulation of each of the specified methods of obtaining and criminal procedural involvement of facts; 2) the assessment of facts and the degree of their reliability and scope depend on the method of obtaining 3) proposals have been formulated to improve the provisions of the domestic criminal procedure law in order to establish uniformity in the terminological apparatus; 4) recommendations have been developed on the use of the terms «proof», «establishment», «identification» in various contexts of law enforcement criminal procedural activities.