The work is devoted to a study of a procedural order of the first instance court hearings under the criminal procedure law of Israel. The author argues that the processes of legal convergence, which began to appear more and more prominently at the turn of the XX and XXI centuries, stipulate the demand for comparative studies that allow a deeper understanding of the essence of legal regulators existing in other countries, and borrowing really positive experience which is provided for practice, without allowing legal divergence. Scientific interest in the authenticity of Israel's criminal procedures is determined by the affiliation of its legal system to mixed legal systems, which successfully combines features of common, continental, Jewish and Muslim law that is most valuable for research at the present stage, taking into account persistent global trends of levelling the boundaries between legal systems.
The dissertation examines historical and legal conditions of formation of criminal procedure law of Israel, the system of its sources and principles, defines the essence and reveals general provisions of court proceedings in the first instance, and its features compared to court proceedings in Ukraine. It has been concluded that, despite the historical conditionality of borrowing the law of evidence of the Anglo-American legal system in the criminal process of Israel, the latter has its own characteristics.
It is emphasized that the court hearing at the first instance under Israeli law, as well as in Ukraine, is considered a central stage of criminal proceedings, the purpose of which is to consider the case on the merits, examine and verify evidence, deliver a verdict of guilt or innocence, and pass a sentence by a court. The peculiarities of the model of the first instance court hearing under Israeli law are considered, among which, in particular, its structuring into two main stages, within which there are autonomous processes of proof, that have their own subject, and as a result they have an independent decision: 1) examination of evidence of guilt / innocence of the accused, ending with the delivering a verdict of guilt or innocence; 2) examination of the evidence that determines the imposition of punishment, ending with the verdict.
Positively assessing such a construction of the judicial investigation, the author proposes to borrow it for the trial in the first instance in Ukraine, which is justified by the specificity and purposefulness of the parties to the criminal proceedings; rationalization of court activity; ensuring the impartiality of the court; procedural economy.
Based on more than 70 years of experience of the probation institute in Israeli criminal procedure, the author emphasizes the expediency of introducing into the criminal proceedings of Ukraine a procedure according to which the court may charge a probation officer with a task of making a decision about a change of precautionary measure resulting from the motion of the parties or on its own initiative.
Despite Israel's affiliation to mixed-type legal systems and dominance of precedent among the other sources of law, the candidate for a degree sees the expansion of the scope of normative regulation of criminal procedure as a promising direction of its legal policy, inasmuch as wide judicial discretion, not limited by law, in some cases can adversely affect the rights and legitimate interests of litigants and, above all, the defence counsel.
On the basis of the conducted research the vectors of mutually beneficial borrowing of positive experience of Ukraine and Israel for the purpose of improvement of the order of judicial review in court of the first instance are defined.
