Polysemia as a defect of criminal procedure law

Abstract

The article is devoted to the identification of characteristic features of legislative defects caused by regulatory legal acts (or within legislative acts) of terminological interpretations that are ambiguous. Polysemy quite often has a negative impact on the universal conceptual-categorical apparatus. Attention is drawn to the fact that the homogeneity of the subject matter of the legal regulation requires the maximum terminological clarity, since the context of the individual legal relations is not in itself sufficiently pronounced to provide a clear delineation of the meaning of the ambiguous term. The manifestations of normative polysemy only reduce the clarity of the law and create difficulties in law enforcement, including in the field of criminal justice. The manifestation of polysemy in criminal procedural law is considered on the example of the ambiguous legal term "reconciliation", the definition of legal meaning of which is determined only by the context of its use. In addition, the study draws attention to the fact that in the criminal procedural legislation there are cases where the problem of polysemy is not solved by taking into account the contextual meaning, and the use of means of interpreting the text of the law does not provide a clear answer. This situation is illustrated by an example of the use by the legislator of the identical terminological designation "trial" both for the name of the stage of proceedings in the court of first instance, and for the name of its separate (second) stage, which involves the examination of evidence. Suggestions are made to eliminate and overcome the described legislative defects.