Criminal Procedure Acts as Forms of Public Administration

The aim of this article is a comprehensive doctrinal and legal study of criminal procedure acts as specific means of administration in its broad sense, which involves the activities of all branches of government and other state bodies. The methodological basis of the article includes general scientific methods of cognition (system analysis, comparison, generalization, synthesis, deduction, analogy) and specific methods: historical law, comparative law, law enforcement studies, technical and legal, and others. Summarizing the currently existing research results in the field of legal acts, the authors of the article substantiate the thesis that criminal procedural acts of inquiry, preliminary investigation, prosecutor's office and the court are also specific means of public administration. Therefore, they are subject to further consideration in the context of methodological continuity to theories of administrative law, yet with due account of the peculiarities predetermined by the purpose of criminal proceedings. A similar approach, expressed in the integration of various legal sciences and in the development of intersectoral relations, specifies the following essential features of criminal procedure acts: (a) their official, governmental nature, which brings them under the jurisdiction of public law entities with appropriate powers; (b) a unilateral procedure for their issuance, which excludes the possibility of influence from subjects they are addressed to on the expression of will in them; (c) imperativeness expressed in the obligatoriness of any criminal procedure act for all its addressees; (d) the place of criminal procedure acts in the general hierarchical system of state legal acts characterized by complex, multi-stage mechanisms for the implementation of public authority; (e) the regulatoriness of criminal procedure acts and the non-normative nature and law enforcement content related to it; (f) mandatory legal consequences of any criminal procedure act expressed in the emergence of new legal relations, change or termination of already existing ones; (g) their resolutive nature, which suggests governmental decisions (resolutions) of preliminary investigation bodies, the prosecutor or the court; (h) a special form and normatively established procedure for the adoption of criminal procedure acts. The authors come to the following conclusion: criminal procedure acts are hierarchically systematized official imperative unilateral expressions of inquiry, preliminary investigation, prosecutor's office and court, containing subordinate law-enforcement decisions of a governmental nature, aimed at emergence, change or termination of legal relations or conditions in the field of criminal proceedings.

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