Review

The chaos in usage and interpretation of the terms connected with the confidential (tacit) cooperation, which has a negative impact on law enforcement practice, is observed nowadays in legislation, subordinate normative acts, scientific sources and educational literature. Unification of the terminology requires a proper background, which namely determines the necessity of this research.

The purpose of the article is to define correlation of the notions "confidential cooperation" and "tacit cooperation" as the categories of the theory and the practice of criminal proceeding and operative-search activity.

The main theoretical result of the study is the clear definition of correlation and delineation of the concepts "confidential cooperation" and "tacit cooperation". The main practical result of the study is the provision of recommendations as to the usage of these terms in law-making activity.

The following conclusions are made as the results of the research.

In theory and practice of criminal proceeding and operative-search activity the term tacit cooperation is worth to be used in order to identify the covert usage of services of persons who agreed, on the principles of conspiracy, to acquire and to provide operative units with the necessary information, to create the conditions, necessary for certain actions, measures, operations secretly, to participate in this kind of actions directly, etc.

Under the term “tacit cooperation” we propose to understand the covert interaction between law enforcement officials authorized by legislation (operative officers, investigators of the pre-trial investigation bodies, detectives of the NABU of Ukraine) and persons involved into accomplishment of the tasks of operative and investigative activities and criminal proceedings. The indicated interaction is carried out on the principles of conspiracy: not only its content, but also the fact itself is covered.

The usage of the term "confidential cooperation" is possible in the other sense: interaction between authorized law enforcement officials and persons, involved into accomplishment of the tasks of the law enforcement activity, which is carried out transparently, but providing secrecy of the information exchange’s content.

Key words: tacit cooperation, confidential cooperation, criminal proceeding, pre-trial investigation, operative-search activity.