GEVORG BARSEGHIAN

PhD Student at the Chair of Criminal Law of

YSU Faculty of Law, Lecturer

DOI: https://doi.org/10.59546/18290744-2025.1-3-100

Annotation.

Employees of bodies carrying out operational-search activities and persons cooperating with these bodies play a significant role in the fight against crime. In the course of preventing criminal offenses committed or being committed by others, mitigating their consequences, uncovering crimes, or obtaining necessary evidence, individuals engaged in operational-search activities may face real possibilities of causing harm to interests protected under Criminal Law. Therefore, Criminal Law should provide the possibility of exempting a person engaged in operational-search activities from criminal liability for an act that is formally deemed unlawful, provided that specific conditions of legality are met—taking into account the absence of unlawfulness in the act and its socially beneficial and purpose-driven nature.

However, an analysis of the grounds for exemption from criminal liability as established in the Criminal Code of the Republic of Armenia reveals that the issue under consideration is not comprehensively regulated, and there is no developed integrated legal norm aimed at exempting individuals engaged in operational-search activities from criminal liability in cases where harm is caused to interests protected by Criminal Law under specific conditions of legality. This article focuses on examining this specific issue.

Based on the results of the research conducted within the scope of this article, we propose the inclusion of a comprehensive legal norm in the Criminal Code of the Republic of Armenia, titled “Causing Harm to Interests Protected by Criminal Law in the Course of Conducting Operational-Search Measures”. This provision would aim to exempt individuals engaged in operational-search activities from criminal liability when harm is caused to legally protected interests under specific conditions of legality.

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