Conceptual Understanding of a Law Enforcement Officer as a Victim in Art. 342 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine

Abstract

Abstract. The article analyzes the signs of one of the victims specified in Art. 342 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine – a law enforcement officer. The interdependence between the work of the state mechanism, the interaction of the state and civil society institutions, ensuring and protecting the rights and freedoms and legitimate interests of individuals and legal entities and the compliance of the current criminal legislation with real social, political, economic, military challenges has been determined. It was stated that it is the construction of the composition of a particular criminal offense that is of great importance for the application of the rules of law. Determining the effectiveness of the current criminal law norms that regulate the criminal law protection of law enforcement officers and the analysis of their practical application are a significant problem, because the victim is exactly the element of the criminal offense that characterizes its object together with the subject of the commission. Taking into account the diverse performance by law enforcement agencies of functions that are not peculiar to them in peacetime, the clarification of the essence of the law enforcement officer as a victim in Art. 342 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine requires in-depth study, because these norms are the basis for classifying socially dangerous acts as illegal, defining such key concepts as a criminal offense and punishment for its commission. The purpose of the article is to establish the content of the victim in Art. 342 of the current Criminal Code of Ukraine – an employee of the law enforcement agency, the formulation of the directions of improvement of the norms of the current criminal legislation. The research methods are chosen in accordance with the specified goal and constitute a complex of general scientific and special legal methods, the set of which contributed to ensuring the comprehensiveness and validity of the results obtained, namely: dogmatic (formal-legal), system methods, methods of synthesis and generalization. It is proved that the improvement of the norms of the current Criminal Code of Ukraine in terms of determining an employee of a law enforcement agency as a victim in Art. 342 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine should be carried out through a well-founded normative activity aimed at modernizing criminal legislation and for full criminal protection of this category of persons.

Keywords: criminal offenses; state authorities; local self-government bodies; associations of citizens; criminal offenses against journalists; victim of a criminal offense; law enforcement officer; martial law; criminal offense.