On September 29, 2025, People’s Deputy O.M. Yurchenko submitted to the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine Bill No. 14085 on amending the Criminal Procedure Code of Ukraine regarding the requirement to notify a person of a change to a previously reported (suspicion) provided that the materials of the criminal proceeding are separated.

The Draft Law of Ukraine “On Amendments to the Criminal Procedure Code of Ukraine Regarding the Requirement to Notify a Person of a Change to a Previously Notified (Suspicion) Subject to the Separation of Materials from the Criminal Proceedings” (hereinafter—the Draft Law) was developed to ensure clarity in the legal regulation of notification of suspicion in certain cases, as well as the right of a person suspected of committing a criminal offense to be notified of a new suspicion or of a change to a previously notified suspicion in the event that materials from a pretrial investigation concerning one or more criminal offenses are separated into a separate proceeding.

The author of the draft law aimed to ensure the right of a person with the status of a suspect to be duly informed of the number of the criminal proceeding in which the pretrial investigation is being conducted and in which they have been notified of suspicion.

Despite the author’s positive intentions, if the bill is adopted in its proposed form, the legislation will not provide clear legal regulation regarding the notification of suspicion, in particular due to existing conflicts in the law as well as lexical errors in the text of the bill.

What is the current situation?

Pursuant to Article 217 of the Criminal Procedure Code of Ukraine, if necessary, the materials of a pretrial investigation concerning one or more criminal offenses may be separated into a separate proceeding, if a single person is suspected of committing several criminal offenses or if two or more persons are suspected of committing one or more criminal offenses.

At the same time, the Code of Criminal Procedure of Ukraine does not contain a mandatory provision requiring that a person be notified of a new suspicion or of a change to a previously notified suspicion solely on the condition that the materials of the criminal proceedings are separated in accordance with Article 217 of the Code of Criminal Procedure of Ukraine.

As a result, the pre-trial investigation authority has no grounds to serve a person with a new notice of suspicion or a notice of a change to a previous suspicion within the scope of the separated criminal proceedings.

What Is Proposed?

The draft law proposes amending the Criminal Procedure Code of Ukraine to establish that, in the event that materials from a pretrial investigation concerning one or more criminal offenses are separated into a separate proceeding, persons suspected of committing a criminal offense shall be served with a notice of the new suspicion or of a change to the previously notified suspicion.

Legal Consequences of Adopting the Bill

Despite the author’s desire to demonstrate the necessity of adopting this bill, as well as its uniqueness in addressing a number of issues, the following should be noted.

The Secretariat of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine has developed and adopted Rules for Drafting Bills and Basic Requirements for Legislative Drafting (methodological recommendations). These methodological recommendations were developed to standardize the drafting of bills and ensure compliance with legislative drafting requirements when preparing bills to amend existing legislative acts.

Each draft law has a title, which is an integral part of the official text of the law. The title of the law concisely (in a few words) sets forth the content of the law. To this end, informative terms are used that allow one to identify the subject matter regulated by this law.

From the title of the draft law “On Amendments to the Criminal Procedure Code of Ukraine Regarding the Necessity of Notifying a Person of a Change to a Previously Notified (the word ‘suspicion’ is omitted) in the event of the separation of materials from criminal proceedings,” it is impossible to understand the content of the draft law due to a lexical error, namely the omission of the key word “suspicion.”

A similar lexical error is also present in the text of the draft law itself. Thus, it proposes: to supplement Part 1 of Article 276 (of the Code of Criminal Procedure of Ukraine) with paragraph 4 reading as follows: “4) the separation of materials from the criminal proceedings in accordance with (missing word – “as provided for”) Article 217 of this Code.”

However, the biggest problem with the bill lies not only in the lexical errors but in the author’s proposal to require the service of a notice of a change to a previously notified suspicion in only one case: when materials from a pretrial investigation concerning one or more criminal offenses are separated into a separate proceeding.

The authority to separate materials from a pretrial investigation concerning one or more criminal offenses into a separate proceeding is granted exclusively to the prosecutor. Furthermore, the prosecutor’s procedural decision to separate materials from a pretrial investigation is not subject to appeal.

However, in practice, prosecutors often exceed the scope of their authority, as set forth in Part 3 of Article 217 of the Code of Criminal Procedure of Ukraine, and separate pretrial investigation materials concerning individuals not identified by the investigation into newly created proceedings.

Most often, prosecutors make such decisions in criminal proceedings concerning criminal offenses committed by two or more persons, some of whom have not been identified as of the time the pretrial investigation materials are separated. This approach by prosecutors to interpreting the provisions of Part 3 of Article 217 of the Code of Criminal Procedure of Ukraine is erroneous, leading to the exclusion of all evidence transferred to a separate proceeding.

The only correct procedure for prosecutors, when it is necessary to preserve materials from criminal proceedings concerning persons not yet identified by the investigation for the purpose of conducting a further pretrial investigation, is to separate into a separate proceeding only those materials in which there is already one or more suspects, while leaving the remaining materials in the original (“parent”) criminal proceeding.

However, another problem with separating pretrial investigation materials into separate proceedings remains the use by prosecutors of the aforementioned provisions of the Code of Criminal Procedure for procedural manipulation and the concealment of evidence, which could be used by the defense to the suspect’s advantage or to exonerate the suspect.

In accordance with the requirements of Part 2 of Article 9 of the CPC of Ukraine, the prosecutor, the head of the pretrial investigation body, and the investigator are obligated to investigate the circumstances of the criminal proceedings comprehensively, fully, and impartially, identifying both incriminating circumstances as well as those that exonerate the suspect or defendant, and the circumstances that mitigate or aggravate their punishment, to provide them with a proper legal assessment, and to ensure that lawful and impartial procedural decisions are made.

Similar provisions are also enshrined in Part 5 of Article 223 of the Criminal Procedure Code of Ukraine, namely, if evidence is obtained during an investigative (search) action that may indicate a person’s innocence of committing a criminal offense, the investigator or prosecutor is obligated to conduct the relevant investigative (search) action in full, attach the prepared procedural documents to the pretrial investigation materials, and submit them to the court when filing an indictment, a motion to apply coercive measures of a medical or educational nature, or a motion to exempt a person from criminal liability.

At the same time, in practice, prosecutors ignore these requirements of the law, and prior to disclosing the pretrial investigation materials to the defense (in accordance with Article 290 of the Code of Criminal Procedure of Ukraine), only those materials from the pretrial investigation are separated into a separate proceeding which, in the prosecutor’s opinion, cannot be used by the defense as evidence of the person’s innocence regarding the commission of a criminal offense.

All other evidence that is “inconvenient” for the prosecutor remains in the original (“parent”) criminal proceeding, is not disclosed to the defense in accordance with Article 290 of the Criminal Procedure Code of Ukraine, and is subject to the confidentiality of the pretrial investigation.

It is this problem that must first and foremost be resolved by the legislature so that the parties to criminal proceedings have equal rights and opportunities to present evidence to the court.

Returning to the changes proposed by the draft law (which are undoubtedly beneficial to the defense, as they provide the opportunity to know in which criminal proceeding a person has the status of a suspect and acquires the corresponding rights), it should be noted that the case number changes not only when materials from a pretrial investigation are separated. Thus, when pre-trial investigation materials are consolidated, the criminal proceeding is assigned the number of the proceeding that was registered earlier in the Unified Register of Pre-trial Investigations.

At the same time, the provisions of the Criminal Procedure Code of Ukraine do not contain a mandatory rule requiring that a person be notified of a new suspicion or of a change to a previously notified suspicion in the event that the materials of criminal proceedings are consolidated in accordance with the procedure provided for in Article 217 of the CPC of Ukraine, and the criminal proceeding number entered in the Unified Register of Pre-trial Investigations is changed.

Consequently, in the event of the consolidation of criminal case materials, when the criminal case number changes, the defense remains uninformed of such actions by the prosecutor’s office and of the fact that the criminal proceeding number specified in the notice of suspicion does not correspond to the Unified Register of Pre-trial Investigations, which may lead to negative consequences for both the defense and the investigating judges.

The adoption of this bill has a positive aspect in terms of ensuring that persons with the status of suspects are informed of changes to the criminal proceeding number. However, overall, the bill requires further refinement to correct lexical errors in its text and to ensure that the procedure for amending the notice of suspicion also applies when pre-trial investigation materials are consolidated.

To eliminate existing procedural manipulations, it would be advisable to propose enshrining in Article 290 of the Code of Criminal Procedure of Ukraine the prosecutor’s obligation to provide the defense with copies of the pretrial investigation materials that remain in the original criminal proceeding, while simultaneously granting the defense written permission to disclose such information exclusively within the scope of the court proceedings for the criminal case that has been separated into a separate proceeding and referred to court.