Judicial precedent: an irrelevant past or a promising step into the future

The article examines the importance of implementing judicial precedent as a new tool in the justice system of Ukraine, defends the position regarding Ukraine’s promising step towards European integration by modernizing the judicial system, creating stable and reliable practice through the implementation of domestic judicial precedent. The position regarding the importance of decisions of the European Court of Human Rights is being reviewed. It is argued that the positions of the Criminal Court of Cassation as part of the Supreme Court do not provide clear guidelines for lower courts and, accordingly, create an unclear, variable and inconsistent practice that does not meet the principle of justice. Based on the analysis of judicial practice, there seems to be an ambiguous position regarding the legality of conducting a simultaneous study of information from a seized phone during a search, since a search is the extraction of evidence, and not the extraction of information from this evidence in the process of extracting the latter, their research is a separate stage that is carried out after the search , and not during the search. This practice is an abuse of procedural rights in the course of conducting investigative (search) action by the pretrial investigation body, which entails the recognition of evidence obtained in this way as «fruits of a poisonous tree.» The position of the cassation instance, according to which the partial absence of a record of the progress of the NS(R)D control over the commission of a crime in the form of operational procurement does not indicate the inadmissibility of the information obtained during its implementation. It is obvious that such a statement as «partial lack of record» is inadmissible in the criminal procedural aspect, since a valid question arises regarding the criteria that will be the basis of which partiality does not give rise to the inadmissibility of the evidence, and which gives rise, which will decide the fate of the person accordingly. The implementation of judicial precedent in law enforcement practice will contribute to the unity of judicial practice, the quality of justice, increasing the trust of citizens in the judiciary, the predictability of the protection of violated rights, etc. The high level of professional training of judges, their awareness of international standards for ensuring compliance with human rights provides all the grounds for the emergence of national precedents as criteria of justice, which does not exclude in-depth argumentation with reference to the practice of the ECtHR.