TRUTH AND ADVERSARIALISM IN CRIMINAL PROCEEDINGS: INTEGRATION CHALLENGES

Abstract

The compatibility of the adversarial principle in criminal proceedings with the goal of establishing objective truth remains a subject of ongoing scholarly debate and a source of contradictions within current criminal procedure legislation. The attempt to resolve these contradictions based on the theory of integrating the public interest and adversarial principles in criminal procedure, developed in N.V. Tkacheva’s doctoral thesis, represents a novel contribution to legal scholarship and has inevitably attracted significant attention. Purpose: to prove that the adversarial nature of criminal proceedings does not hinder the ascertainment of truth, nor does it stand in a dichotomous contradiction with it; rather, it represents the primary procedural mechanism for its determination through the clash of opposing positions, mutual criticism of arguments, and possibility of verifying claims by an independent, objective, and impartial court. Adversarial proceedings ensure a more reliable establishment of the circumstances of a crime compared to the one-sided collection and examination of evidence, provided that criminal justice is viewed as the totality of two interconnected but independent stages – pre-trial and trial. The research methodology relies on a dialectical understanding of truth as the correspondence of court findings to the factual circumstances of the case, as well as the conceptual foundations of legal process theory. A logical-argumentative approach is employed as the methodological framework: criminal procedural proof is understood as the logical substantiation of the thesis of guilt or innocence. The adversarial procedure is interpreted as a mechanism for ensuring the completeness and critical examination of arguments: the mutual refutation of the parties’ claims enhances the reliability of the final conclusion and thus serves as a means of achieving truth. The formal-legal method revealed the normative content of requirements for evidence and adversarial procedures. Through the systemic approach, it is shown how norms on the admissibility and comprehensive verification of evidence form a unified system of guarantees for the reliability of the outcome, while the logical-analytical method allows for considering the adversarial clash of positions as a means of increasing the validity of the court’s final conclusions. The study substantiates that adversarialism does not conflict with the goal of establishing truth; rather, it serves as its primary procedural mechanism. The adversarial model of legal proceedings increases the probability of truth-finding through mechanisms of verification and refutation, although it does not automatically guarantee it.