GENESIS OF CRIMINAL LIABILITY AND THE PREVENTION OF CORRUPTION CRIMES IN UKRAINE

Abstract

This article presents a view on peculiarities of criminalization of acts of corruption (corrupt practices, offences) and on their prevention in Ukraine in different historical times. Besides, a personal variation of periodization of this practice has been introduced that allows performing the comparison of correspondent corruption phenomena in foreign countries with classification of genesis. It has been established that acts of corruption fixed in written sources have been developing during rather long time. In the criminal laws of state formations on the territory of Ukraine of past ages there were no direct indications on “corruption-related” crimes (offences), their list and specific types, and therefore, we define the most typical forms of their objectivization as “corruption expression”, “corruption practices”, “acts of corruption”, etc., which could have various forms of their external manifestation and which in different ages had various names (“sacrifice”, “offering gifts”, “palm greasing”, “bribability”, “sin”, “extortion”, “feeding”, “bribetaking”, “venality”, “bribery”, “favouritism”, etc.). If to speak about measures to prevent acts of corruption, it has to be mentioned that within a historical context they cannot be characterized by systemacity, large scope, correspondent levels, and other important features. Only in 2014 the concept of corruption-related crime was firstly introduced into the criminal law of Ukraine of 2001 as a consequence of implementation of provisions of correspondent international Anti-corruption Conventions of previous decades. Phenomenality of corruption crimes is tightly connected with the absence of any historical example of its complete liquidation both in a separate state and within separately determined chronological period. Corruption as one of the oldest phenomena in social relations has continuously been altered and modified throughout history and new forms of its expression have appeared due to complication of political and economic order. Taking into consideration the aforesaid, in order to have comprehensive understanding of modern issues of criminal liability and prevention of corruption-related crimes (corruption-related offences) in Ukraine, it is actual to appeal to an estimation of practice of the fight against various acts of corruption and their prevention in correspondent state formations of the past ages from the perspective of its optimality, reasonableness, and correlation with political, economic and social challenges of the life in those days. Besides, the comparison of periodization of criminal liability development and corruption-related crimes in Ukraine and in foreign countries would be of great importance as such investigations are practically non-existent. At the same time we understand that we may actually speak about criminal liability just for corruption-related crimes and their prevention (both on national and worldwide basis) in a strict sense taking into consideration only the last hundred years, that means the period, when the term “corruption” and its derived concepts have become steadily used in policy, regulatory legal acts, and legal literature, when international Anti-corruption Conventions have been adopted, basing on which the correspondent provisions in the criminal law of some specific countries have been approved and reformed thereafter, and also anti-corruption programs (laws) have been developed. However, the diverse corruption phenomena of the past (sacrifice, offering gifts, palm greasing, extortion, “feeding”, “bribetaking”, “venality”, bribery, etc.) have formed the basis for appearance of modern complex concept of “corruption-related crime (corruption-related criminal offence)”.