Standards for ensuring the legality of covert activities in criminal proceedings through the prism of European Court of Human Rights

Abstract

The subject of research is the implementation of covert activities in criminal proceedings through the prism of international acts, decisions of the European Court of Human Rights.The purpose of the work is to formulate common standards for ensuring the legality of implementing covert activities in criminal process through the prism of legal positions of the European Court Of Human Rights.The methodological basis or research isthe totality of general and special scientific methods of scientific cognition. The formal-legal (legal-technical) method was used to study the rules of law, to analyze the features of legal technique; and the hermeneutical method revealed the legal content of the norms, legislative proposals and defects in legal regulation. The statistical method helped to generalize judicial practice of ECHR. While building up the system of the standards for the ensuring the legality of implementing covert activities in criminal process we used the system-structural method.The main results and conclusions. The analysis of the legal positions of the ECHR made it possible to conditionally single out the following standards for ensuring the legality of the implementation of covert activity in criminal proceedings:– predictability. Its essence lies in the fact that the grounds, procedural order, conditions, timing, the circle of persons and crimes in relation to which it is allowed to carry out covert activities should be as detailed, clear and accurate as possible in the criminal procedural legislation. Moreover, any person had the opportunity to familiarize himself with the relevant regulatory prescriptions and foresee the actions that can be carried out in relation to him;– warranty against abuse. The content of this standard can be disclosed by more detailed highlighting of clarifying provisions ("substandards"). These include: control of interference in human rights and freedoms; the certainty of the circle of persons in relation to whom it is possible to carry out secret activities; limited corpus delicti, for the purpose of investigation or prevention of which covert activity is allowed; the existence in national legislation of procedures that facilitate the law of the implementation of covert activity in criminal proceedings; the temporary nature of the implementation of secret activities in the criminal process;– verifiability. The essence of this standard can be disclosed through the establishment of judicial control over the decision of the issue regarding the possible destruction of information obtained in the course of conducting covert activities, which is not relevant to criminal proceedings, as well as the requirement for the mandatory opening of decisions that were the basis for conducting covert investigative actions;– exclusivity. The main content of this standard is that covert activity in criminal proceedings can be carried out only in cases where the disclosure or prevention of a crime in another way is impossible or is too complicated;– proportionality of the intervention and its expediency. The essence of this standard is that the implementation of certain covert coercive actions that are associated with the restriction of human rights and freedoms must be proportionate to the goals for which such actions are directed. Moreover, these goals and the applied coercion must be necessary in a democratic society;– inadmissibility of tacit interference in the communication of some subjects. First of all, this requirement concerns the need to legislatively guarantee non-interference in communication between a lawyer and his client, a priest and an accused, etc., which means a ban on targeted control over the communication of certain subjects, as well as the obligation to destroy information obtained in the course of an accidental, situational interfering with their communication.