The stage of a criminal case initiation: are there sufficient guarantees from abuse of right?

The article discusses the need for the stage of initiating a criminal case, its content, the ability to ensure the protection of the rights and legitimate interests of persons involved in criminal proceedings, to prevent abuse of the right. The tasks of the stage of a criminal case initiation are determined. The question of whether the current legal regulation of this stage allows solving the tasks it faces is considered. It is substantiated that the task of a rapid response to information containing data on the elements of a crime and the maximum fixation of these data is not currently solved. The legal means available within this stage allow one to speak of turning it into a "quasi-investigation", on the one hand. At the same time, the materials received at this stage are usually subject to verification during the preliminary investigation, which leads to duplication in the activities of bodies that verify the existence of grounds for initiating a criminal case and conduct preliminary investigation, increases the time for pre-trial proceedings as a whole, and reduces the guarantee of the reliability of the evidence thus obtained. At this stage, attempts to reliably establish all the elements of the offense, persons who committed it, to be certain in the real possibility of convicting them during the preliminary investigation, i.e. in the judicial perspective, lead to abuse of power by officials: either to a denial in the acceptance of a statement under various pretexts, or to a refusal to initiate a criminal case, which, as a consequence, does not contribute to the access of citizens to justice, to the protection of their rights and legitimate interests. On the contrary, the stage of initiation of a criminal case does not always work as a sufficient "screen" against abuses by the applicant party that tries to use the criminal procedure mechanism for solving some self-serving tasks rather than for its purpose. In this connection, the need to change the scientific problem is argued: instead of the traditional approach, which discusses the need for the very stage of initiating a criminal case and questions about the admissibility of certain investigative actions at this stage, it is proposed to develop a system of checks and balances that defines an acceptable barrier for the initiation of criminal persecution, the mobility factors of this system and the organisational and legal mechanism for implementing this mobility.

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