The dissertation comprehensively researches the problems of criminal responsibility
for mishandling of classified information, substantiates new scientific provisions, and
develops proposals for improving legal regulation in this area. A new end-to-end approach
to the study of a group of encroachments on classified information has been formulated,
which should be distinguished not by the subject, but by the content of the act. Its result was
a theoretical generalization and a new solution to the scientific task of determining the key
features of the legal components of the criminal offenses of disclosure of classified
information, the development of a typical model of the normative-theoretical statutory
concept of the disclosure of classified information, typical limits of punishment for the
corresponding criminal offenses, as well as the development of recommendations for
improvement of the corresponding norms in the Criminal Code of Ukraine.
The state of scientific research on the problems of criminal responsibility for
mishandling of classified information was considered and the regulation of criminal
responsibility for mishandling of classified information in separate sources and monuments
of law on the territory of Ukraine was studied. In particular, it was established that the
emergence of criminal responsibility for mishandling of classified information is historically
connected with the state's protection of specific types of information. It was revealed that
the modern development of the criminal law is characterized by a tendency that consists in
the spontaneous multiplication of norms-prohibitions regarding the disclosure of certain
types of information. It is often caused by the development of relevant industry legislation
or political will without proper justification.
Particular attention is paid to establishing the types of links of regulatory and criminal
law norms that extend their effect to the disclosure of classified information, which is not9
reduced to blanketness and classification of types of classified information. The author
substantiated for the first time that the best is the logical connection between the regulatory
obligation and the criminal law prohibition (the relation of the opposite: if the obligation is
observed - the prohibition is not violated), since it is about equivalent general judgments, in
which for every imaginable in the subject, a certain feature is asserted (obligation) or denied
(prohibition) by the plural element. It has been proven that the existence of a general normprohibition, norm-obligation or legal norm in the regulatory legislation is a normative basis
for criminalizing the corresponding type of illegal behavior regarding the disclosure of
information protected by law, as well as that the regulation of cases of lawful disclosure of
classified information in the branch legislation allows to draw conclusions about the content
of signs of the illegality of criminal offenses-disclosures. Defects in the norms of regulatory
law were revealed, which do not allow to systematize the subjects of criminal offensesdisclosures: inconsistency in the scope of concepts of specific types of classified
information, uncertainty of the content of certain types of them, non-systematic
differentiation of types of illegal acts, lack of a single terminological apparatus.
An analysis of the norms providing responsibility for the disclosure of classified
information and the practice of their application was carried out. It is substantiated that the
existing norms-prohibitions, which relate to encroachments on classified information,
cannot be systematized by combining them within the limits of a separate section of the
Special Part of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, because today the conceptual basis for
combining the composition of criminal offenses into separate sections is their the so-called
generic object. At the same time, it was proposed for the first time to divide all
encroachments on classified information into two groups: “external encroachments”, in
which a subject who does not have access to information commits actions aimed at obtaining
this information, its further use, “internal”, when the subject has legal access to information,
but for certain reasons tries to violate the ban on the transfer of information to subjects who
should not have access to it. In addition, in the case of the interaction of external and internal
subjects, it is appropriate to speak of “reciprocal” (“external-internal”) torts, when several
subjects, one of which has legitimate access to this information, interact to achieve a
criminal result regarding the violation of the ban on accessible information.
