Review

Quality and efficiency of the legal regulation of social relations depends on the proper understanding of the essence and preciseness of the legal definition of expressions used in the legislation and the subordinate legal acts. Various interpretation of terms used in legal acts establishes conditions for violating human rights and freedoms, spreading corruption, allowing to commit acts harmful for the state and separate citizens with impunity, for justifying criminals. Unclear definition of legal terms disorganizes the work of public authorities, companies, institutions and organizations and often contributes to the emergence of situations when legitimacy is opposed to the expediency. These days, the term “conspiracy” (“secrecy”) is widely used in the Ukrainian law; this term does not have an unambiguous legal interpretation and is often used in different meanings.

Purpose of the article is to identify the causes of the disunity in understanding the term of the conspiracy between the domestic and foreign law-makers, to exhibit consequences of such disunity and to set forth principles of using this term in the Ukrainian regulatory and legal acts.

Major results of the study involve the following statements:

1. Countries where population speaks west European languages, “conspiracy” as a definition reflecting secret activities of clearly illegal and illicit organizations, which employ a sophisticated system of measures to provide for their misdeeds. In the law-making process, the term is used exactly in this meaning.
2. The natural process of historical transformation of its semantic meaning resulted in borrowing (adoption) of this term with the purpose of determining principles, fundamentals, measures and activities of operational units of law-enforcement agencies in Ukraine and in other post-soviet countries.
3. Use of the term “conspiracy” can result in misunderstanding in the field of international legal relations between Ukraine and its partners. Special attention should be paid to those sections of legal acts, which are dealing with international cooperation issues.
4. The above facts do not represent an obstacle for using this term in the laws and regulations (and their sections), which govern the intra-state public relations (not involving foreign subjects of international law).
5. Use of the term “conspiracy” in the Ukrainian regulatory and legal acts has to be accompanied by the clear, understandable and scientifically based definitions of this and related definitions.

Using the term “conspiracy” in the national law is expedient, however it is only possible provided two conditions. Firstly, the term can not be used in the regulatory and legal acts (or their parts), which outline the content and govern organization of international agreements, collaboration with law-enforcement authorities of other countries. Secondly, the content of this term has to be clearly identified from the judicial viewpoint. 

The rule of secrecy, concealment, non-public nature to anyone (except for own right-holders) being the basis of the criminal intelligence and surveillance operations corresponds to the conspiracy approach. The conspiracy approach is covering not only the intelligence and surveillance operations, but also all activities of criminal intelligence units, including execution of investigator’s, prosecutor’s instructions for conducting covert investigative activities. At that, the conspiracy of criminal intelligence units is to be understood as a system of measures aimed at providing for the covertness of these activities.

Key words: conspiracy, secrecy, investigative activities, fight against organized crime, covert investigative (inquiry) activities.