Place of forgery of documents in the system of encroachments on document circulation under the criminal law of Ukraine

Abstract

The dynamism of criminal legislation, the inconsistency of its provisions with each other and with the provisions of regulatory legislation, present the science of criminal law with the task of systematizing relevant material, classifying normative provisions on the basis of objective criteria, finding gaps and excesses in legal regulation, collisions and unjustified competition, and developing proposals for improvement of the state of legal protection of a certain object against criminal and illegal encroachments. At the same time, it should also be borne in mind that document circulation as an object of criminal law protection has not found its separate reflection in the system of the Special Part of the Criminal Code of Ukraine and is protected by the norms on criminal offenses that encroach on completely different generic objects. This makes it difficult to have a systematic idea of the place of criminal offenses related to forgery of documents in this system. The science of criminal law has in its arsenal deep and thorough studies of both the system of encroachments on the document circulation itself and certain problems of the criminal law regulation of certain types of document forgery. At the same time, the development of social relations, the appearance of specific types of documents, the introduction of changes and additions to the Criminal Code of Ukraine, does not allow to conclude that the problem of determining the place of forgery of documents in the system of encroachments on document circulation under the Criminal Code of Ukraine is finally resolved. The article puts forward and substantiates a hypothesis regarding the system of types of encroachments on the document circulation and determining, on the basis of objective criteria, the place in it of a group of criminal offenses related to forgery of documents. Forgery of documents is a set of criminal offenses aimed at the appearance in objective reality of a false document. In this way, it differs from the illegal handling of real or forged documents, which also interferes with the circulation of documents.