The objective side of the composition of criminal offenses consisting in the forgery of documents

Abstract

Analyzing the system of criminal offenses that encroach on the document circulation and whose content is document forgery, we discovered 22 independent compositions of the corresponding offenses. They are contained in different Sections of the Special Part of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, and therefore have a different structure of the direct object of the offense, however, each of them, either as the main direct object or as an additional mandatory direct object, contains document circulation, since the essence of these criminal offenses is reduced to the point that as a result of their commission, in objective reality, an unauthentic, falsified document of a certain type appears. The analysis of the text of the Criminal Code of Ukraine made it possible to single out the specifics of the wording of the objective side of criminal offenses consisting of forgery of documents, and to conclude that despite the sufficiently broad terminological apparatus used by the legislator to define the act of forgery, issues with establishing the content of the used features remains more than the identified answers. The purpose of this article was to reveal the content of the signs of the objective side of the composition of criminal offenses, which consist in the forgery of documents, and to develop, on this basis, proposals for improving the normative provisions of the Criminal Code of Ukraine.
 The conducted research made it possible to propose the following key positions. Pluralism in marking the act as a sign of the objective side of criminal offenses consisting of forgery of documents is a generally negative phenomenon and one that should be eliminated in the text of the current Criminal Code of Ukraine. With the small exception of specific types of forgery, the term “forgery” should be used as part of the relevant offenses. At the same time, the meaning of this concept should be understood as follows: forgery is a type (form) of deception, which consists in the complete or partial distortion of the content of a document, resulting in a document that does not accurately reflect reality. This understanding of forgery makes it possible to find additional arguments in favor of the statement that forgery of documents is also possible through inaction.