Criminal law signs of illegal hunting as an element of criminological characteristics

Abstract

The criminal law signs of illegal hunting, where the subject is the infliction of significant damage, which is the result of illegal hunting in nature reserves or other territories and objects of the nature reserve fund, hunting of animals, birds or other species of animals listed in the Red List books of Ukraine, the content of the violation of hunting rules, the forms of such violation, the social danger of illegal hunting, which is manifested in the uncontrolled and arbitrary extraction of animals, which destroys the balance in the general ecosystem of the natural environment have been studied.

The purpose of the study is to characterize and identify the normatively defined forms of the objective side of illegal hunting, their analysis and generalization, the characteristics of qualified types of illegal hunting, the implementation of criminological characteristics of this type of criminal offenses and the analysis of their determinative complex. The methods of the conducted research were chosen in view of its purpose and tasks and taking into account the features of the object and subject. The study is based on the dialectical method of cognition, which allowed to form an idea about the crime-forming features of this offense in their development and their relationship with other features of the offense, related categories and phenomena. The method of structural and systemic analysis made it possible to determine the place of norms on the procedure for hunting and its violation in the system of norms of the Criminal Code of Ukraine and norms defining the elements of such a procedure in the Law of Ukraine “On Hunting grounds and Hunting” dated February 22, 2000 No. 1478-III. The use of the dogmatic method made it possible to determine the existing approaches to determining the content and essence of hunting as a form of human activity, the formal-logical method – to determine the places of various (mandatory and optional) signs of a criminally illegal act in the system of elements of the legal composition of illegal hunting (Article 248 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine) and the content of separate categories, which define the forms of special use of the animal world by harvesting hunting animals.

The novelty of the research is the identification and formal definition of the crime-forming features of the objective side of the composition of the criminal offense of illegal hunting. The result of the study is that when investigating criminal offenses of this category, separate and special attention should be paid to optional features, such as the place, time of commission of the criminal offense, method, tools and means of its commission. Determining the optional features of criminal offenses of the specified category makes it possible to correctly distinguish the elements of crimes and distinguish them from the elements of other criminal offenses in practice.