Technical and forensic support for the investigation of war crimes: Concept, purpose, individual areas of development

Abstract

The relevance of this study is conditioned upon the need to investigate the technical and forensic support for the investigation of war crimes that are massively committed in the context of a full-scale military invasion of russia on the territory of Ukraine. The purpose of this study was to define the term “technical and forensic support for the investigation of war crimes”, its purpose and components; to consider the technical equipment used to search for people who disappeared during the war, to identify hidden corpses of people who died during the war, to establish their identity. The study employed a set of scientific methods: terminological, system-structural, formal logical, comparative legal. The terms “technical and forensic support” and “technical and forensic means” were analysed, and the definition of technical and forensic support for war crimes was proposed. The following components of technical and forensic support were investigated: scientific, legal, organizational, educational and methodological, scientific and technical, material and technical support. Attention was drawn to the specific features of technical and forensic support for the investigation of war crimes: constant readiness of authorized entities to use technical means and methods; integrated use of technological systems; involvement of numerous information resources; coordination of work on technical equipment of law enforcement agencies with the provision of other departments, including the Armed Forces of Ukraine. The study focuses on the possibility of using technical and forensic support for the investigation of war crimes by security investigators together with National Police investigators. It was concluded that the technical and forensic support for the investigation of crimes includes a system of legal, scientific, organizational measures aimed at the effective use of technical means and their corresponding methods for investigating criminal offences. Promising areas of development of technical and forensic support for the investigation of war crimes are as follows: the use of drone-made evidence (aerial photography); the use of ground-based 3D scanning; the introduction of systems for detecting and visualizing biological traces of participants in war crimes and their victims; the development of identification and search engines for identifying people involved in the commission of war crimes on the territory of Ukraine