Digital Information Platforms as an Object of Normative Legal Regulation in the Sphere of Criminal Proceedings

Abstract

While noting the general trend for the regulation of digital relations in the sphere of criminal court proceedings, the authors draw attention to the absence of a common approach to this work, or of a universal understanding of criminal procedure norms regarding digital relations, as well as to the drawbacks in preparing new norms that regulate digital relations. Problems connected with the regulation of electronic processes are not specific for Russia only. Laws of some countries do not recognize evidence obtained electronically, and view it as secondary. The results of implementing the road map of digital economy and the approaches to the definition and typification of digital platforms are the basis for laying the foundations of the criminal proceedings’ digitization in Russia. Large-scale growth of innovations for the platforms and an increasing complexity of their architecture enable the solution of a new research task — the spread of digital platforms to various sectors, in this case, to the sphere of criminal proceedings. The authors use the definition of a digital platform approved by the Russian Governmental Commission on Digital Development to formulate their own definition of a digital information platform as an object of normative legal regulation in the sphere of criminal proceedings and prove that it should belong to sectoral digital platforms. The value of the transition to the normative legal regulation of digital information systems in the sphere of court proceedings lies in the reduction of costs and the elimination of the subjective factor by using a package of digital technologies of data processing and changing the system of the division of labor while reaching the purpose of criminal justice. The authors also stress the inappropriateness of simplification and primitivism, when a criminal procedure system is mechanically viewed as a system of distributed registers (blockchain), or when digitization is used as an excuse for suggesting the abolishment of investigative departments as parasites in the digital reality where crime investigation and solution become a job for ordinary internet users.