Crimes against Justice: Qualification Issues and Defense Features

Today, the Unified Register of Pre-trial Investigations contains information on more than four thousand criminal proceedings opened in Ukraine in connection with the investigation of crimes against justice. In addition, this sufficiently testifies to the mass character of this category of cases.

The associate partner of Skliarenko, Sydorenko and Partners, Andriy Trigub, drew attention to this during the III Judicial Forum of the Ukrainian Bar Association during his presentation on the problems of qualifying crimes against justice (Section XVIII of the Criminal Code of Ukraine), as well as the specifics of the defense in this categories of cases.

The lawyer noted that more than 40% of the records of the Unified Register of Pre-trial Investigations (almost 1.7 thousand) are cases related to the non-enforcement of a court decision - a crime, the responsibility for which is established by Art. 382 of the Criminal Code.

“In practice, the debate remains the question of who can be considered the victim, and whether such status can be obtained by a person in whose favor a court decision was made (but not implemented),” A. Trigub drew attention. “Some law enforcement officials and judges are convinced that a person here cannot be a victim, since this is a crime against justice.”

And according to the associate partner of Skliarenko, Sydorenko and Partners, one cannot agree with this approach. “After all, according to this logic, the judge will not be injured in the event of deliberate infliction of beatings or bodily harm to him or in the event of the destruction of his property, because the corresponding unlawful acts (articles 377, 378 of the Criminal Code) are also crimes against justice,” convinces he. Among other typical problems of the defense under this article is that sometimes investigators refuse to recognize a person as a victim due to lack of evidence of harm, or if the application for involvement as a victim was signed by a lawyer rather than the victim himself. However, in such cases, there are effective methods of protecting the interests of the client, which A. Trigub called in his speech.

But the dispositions of Article 375 (Decision of a judge (judges) of an obviously unjust sentence, decision, ruling or decree) and Art. 400-1 (Representation in court without authority with regard to the deliberate failure by the lawyer to include information on the limitations of powers established by the legal aid contract in the warrant) The Criminal Code, according to the lawyer, should be completely excluded from the criminal liability law. After all, these articles in practice can only be used as a lever of extra-procedural influence on judges and defenders.