DOCUMENTING CRUEL TREATMENT OF PRISONERS OF WAR AND CIVILIAN POPULATIONS: COMPLICATIONS AND CHALLENGES

Abstract

The article is devoted to the actual problems that arise when documenting the cruel treatment of prisoners of war and the civilian population. It is emphasized that the for-mation of a high-quality evidentiary base in such proceedings is an extremely important stage of bringing to criminal responsibility the Russian military, who committed the inves-tigated war crime on the territory of Ukraine. It was established that the collection and re-cording of evidentiary information in such proceedings are extremely complicated due to a number of factors, the most significant of which are the following: a threat to the safety of the participants in investigative (search) actions due to territory mining, destruction, shelling, etc.; a significant gap in time between the commission of the investigated crimes and the opportunity to investigate their trace pattern, as well as the loss of a significant part of the traces due to the conduct of active hostilities; the absence of the main participants of the event (witnesses, victims, etc.) due to their death, injury, relocation, captivity, etc.; insuf-ficient experience in the investigation of war crimes, as well as a lack of knowledge in the field of international humanitarian law among domestic law enforcement officers; imperfect algorithms (methodology) for documenting such crimes; the involvement of a significant number of persons (law enforcement officers, military personnel, experts, representatives of international organizations, volunteers, etc.) in the documentation process, whose activ-ities must be coordinated and coordinated; significant duration of expert research due to excessive workload of forensic experts, etc. An attempt was made to develop directions for overcoming complications that can be counteracted, in particular by: intensification of training and continuous improvement of the qualifications of specialists for such investigations (taking into account international practices); maximum use of digital evidence, as well as modern scientific and technical means, which allow individual investigative (search) actions to be carried out indirectly; establishment of effective interaction between the subjects of documentation, taking into account the peculiarities of their information exchange, competence, etc.