This paper highlights the shortcomings and rough edges of the normative regulation of protocols of investigative actions and court sessions as informational assets. These assets are predetermined by the visually-imaginative perception of investigators, detectives, and participants in judicial proceedings of material fragments of objective reality, facilitating the establishment of circumstances significant to criminal cases and the justification of corresponding law enforcement decisions or parties’ positions. Such deficiencies are linked to the lack of a proper scientific basis for these types of evidence, primarily the absence of clear doctrinal positions on their essence and distinctions from other means of criminal procedural proof. Simultaneously, factors that once hindered pre-revolutionary and Soviet scholars from solving this problem are identified, with the possibility of filling these gaps depending on a profound understanding of the methodological principles of the cybernetic (informational) concept of evidence. As a result, it is concluded that protocols of investigative actions and court sessions are conditioned by the so-called non-verbal mode of procedural cognition – which is recommended to be considered the most important determinant for the emergence of such means of proof. The evidence formed in this way is proposed henceforth not to be called protocols, but rather the results of non-verbal investigative and judicial actions. In conclusion, the incremental implementation of the scientific positions formulated in the article into the system of criminal procedural regulation will contribute to optimizing law enforcement activities, primarily by eliminating a number of difficulties arising in the practices of inquiry officers, investigators, prosecutors, lawyers, and courts, and reducing errors caused thereby.

evidence, court session protocol, protocols of investigative actions, results of non-verbal investigative actions, results of non-verbal judicial actions, means of proof, formation of evidence

Rossinsky Sergey Borisovich – Doctor of Juridical Sciences, Professor, Chief Researcher of the Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure and Criminology Sector, Institute of State and Law RAS (10, Znamenka st., Moscow, 119019, Russian Federation), ORCID: 0000-0002-3862-3188, Researcher ID: A-9583-2019, Scopus Author ID: 56578526900, RSCI Author ID: 422673, e-mail: s.rossinskiy@gmail.com

Rossinsky S.B. Protokoly sledstvennyx dejstvij i sudеbnogo zasedaniya kak sredstva dokazyvaniya v ugolovnom sudoproizvodstve: shtrixi k normativnomu portretu [Protocols of investigative actions and court sessions as means of evidence in criminal proceedings: strokes to the normative portrait] Sibirskij yuridicheskij vestnik [Siberian Law Herald]. 2025, no 4 (111), pp. 132–140. – DOI 10.26516/2071-8136.2025.4.132 (in Russian).

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