Correlation of establishing the truth in a criminal case with the appointment of criminal proceedings and the principle of competitiveness

Proshin Vladimir Mikhailovich

The proclamation in the conviction of the fact of establishing «objective truth» in the case raises the question of its correlation with the results of solving problems that determine the purpose of criminal proceedings, both in terms of protecting the rights and legitimate interests of persons and organizations who have suffered from crimes, and protecting the individual from illegal and unfounded accusations, convictions, restrictions on her rights and freedoms. The assumption of the existence of «objective truth» in any case sets the vector movement of the evidentiary process towards its establishment, during which the purpose of criminal proceedings moves to the background, acquiring the form of a normative declaration of indirect application. The orientation of the court towards the need to establish the truth in the case encourages the prosecution to search for it, and not to the process of proving in the adversarial regime, because the purpose and constitutional meaning of the adversarial principle of criminal proceedings is emasculated.

Keywords:criminal offense; circumstances subject to proof in a criminal case; assessment of evidence; crime event; collection, verification and assessment of evidence; admissibility, relevance, reliability and sufficiency of evidence; participant in criminal proceedings; objective truth; relative truth; judge; jurors; criminal sentence, criminal proceedings, appointment of criminal proceedings, adversarial.