Examination of evidence at the initiative of the court of appeal in criminal proceedings

Today, the combined chamber of the Criminal Court of Cassation as part of the Supreme Court is trying to solve the problem of the appellate court’s initiative in the examination of evidence, since the approaches of individual court chambers, namely the First and Third ones, differ. The purpose of this study was to identify those cases when the appellate authority is entitled to investigate the evidence proactively, without encroaching on the components of the principle prescribed in Article 22 of the Criminal Procedural Code of Ukraine. The formal-logical method helped generalize that the content and form of such a review must comply with the principles of criminal proceedings, including equality before the law and the court, as well as competition between the parties (it has been proven that their absence may indicate a violation of both constitutional and convention rights), freedom in presenting their evidence to the court and in proving their persuasiveness before the court. The results of the deductive method helped formulate the following theses: the legislator, understanding the equality of procedural rights not as their uniformity, normalizes it in the Criminal Procedural Code as equality in terms of the possibilities of exercising the granted rights; the legislator also determines such equality of rights from the functions that a certain participant in criminal proceedings is endowed with. The combination of prosecution, defence, and justice in one guise contradicts the adversarial nature of the judicial procedure. The study revealed that the passivity of the parties forces the court to choose its activity within the limits of the function of justice defined for it, and its initiative is aimed at examining the evidence to make a legal, well-founded, and fair decision. It is proved that these features of judicial proceedings are a priori inherent in the appeal review, along with its inherent features, including the determination of the amount of evidence to be examined, as well as compliance with the limits of judicial review, which are normalized by Article 404 of the Criminal Procedural Code of Ukraine. It was found that the initiative of the court of appeal to examine evidence and their further investigation in this court is permissible in situations where such evidence became known after the adoption of the appealed court decision. Compliance with this rule will protect the court from possible violations of the requirements of Article 22 of the Criminal Procedural Code of Ukraine, and scientific developments in this area are designed, among other things, to pave the way for the unity of judicial practice through doctrinal recommendations.