Problems of proving and evaluating electronic evidence in the criminal procedure of the Russian Federation in the context of digitalization of law enforcement activities

Abstract

The growth of the body of information existing in electronic form has outpaced the development of the procedural form for introducing it into a criminal case: the Criminal Procedure Code of the Russian Federation neither defines electronic evidence nor lists it among the types of evidence in Article 74, while the share of acts committed with the use of information and telecommunication technologies, according to the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia, exceeds a third of registered crime. A gap arises between the actual role of electronic data in establishing the circumstances of a case and the absence of special rules for their collection, verification and evaluation. The aim of the work is to identify the procedural difficulties associated with proving and evaluating electronic data and to determine the limits of resolving them within the existing system of means of proof. The formal legal and comparative legal methods, systematic interpretation of norms, generalization of law enforcement practice and legal modelling are applied. It is established that electronic data do not form an independent type of evidence but are distributed among material evidence, other documents and records of investigative actions, while the key difficulties are concentrated on the property of reliability, the verification of which requires recording the integrity of the data and the origin of the copy. Targeted amendments (Articles 164.1 and 164.2 of the Criminal Procedure Code, the admission of electronic documents at the pre-trial stage) resolve individual technological issues without forming a single regime. Preserving electronic data within the system of existing types of evidence while completing the procedures for recording integrity proves a more stable solution than constructing a separate institution, since relevance and reliability remain substantively the same requirements regardless of the medium.