Law. Human. Environment (Apr 2022)
“Disclosure” of restricted information and related terms of criminal law: Interrelation of concepts
Abstract
The relevance of the publication is explained by the fact that one of the main factors of the inefficiency of existing criminal law means of protection of information with limited access is an imperfection of the text of the current Criminal Code of Ukraine, as evidenced by the lack of a systematic approach of the legislator to the legal structure of “disclosure of information”. The purpose of the research is to conduct a comparative legal analysis of the normative regulation of disclosure of information with limited access and tangential terms in criminal law for technical and legal improvement of the Criminal Code of Ukraine. To achieve it, the methods of system-structural analysis, semantic, dogmatic, Aristotelian and classification methods were used. The research considers the correlation of the content of all criminal law terms relating to the concept of disclosure, which are roughly divided into several groups: alternative acts (collection, receipt, modification, destruction, etc.), collected acts (violation of secrecy/prohibition, use), synonymous acts (distribution, disclosure, provision of access, transmission). The alternative acts of “collection” and “possession” have been identified as preparatory to “disclosure” if there is a corresponding purpose for the disclosure of the collected information, and, thus, they cannot be included in the criminal law content of the act of “disclosure” itself. It has been established that the existence of two mutually exclusive (related) legal elements of criminal offences – wrongful acquisition of information (a “truncated element” which does not give legal significance to further actions of storage, dissemination or other use of information) and disclosure (by a person who has lawfully acquired the information) – may be promising by addressing the relevant technical and legal deficiencies. The “disclosure” of relevant information has been demonstrated to constitute a “violation of secrecy” and a “violation of the prohibition on using information”, but such definitions should not be used in the text of the criminal law due to their lack of specificity. Established that the content of the concepts of “disclosure”, “spreading”, and “dissemination” of information is identical. The study is recommended for use in improving Ukraine’s criminal law and for law enforcement officials in qualifying.
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