Review

The article is devoted to a systematic study of the influence of the Constitution of Ukraine and the legal positions of the Constitutional Court of Ukraine on the formation of a constitution-ally oriented doctrine of criminal procedural evidence and the transformation of domestic law-en-forcement practice. The author substantiates that the modern paradigm of evidence in Ukraine is undergoing a profound transformation, driven by the shift from a procedural-technical model characteristic of codified systems of the twentieth century to a model that prioritizes constitutional principles: the rule of law, respect for human dignity, freedom, privacy, personal autonomy, access to justice, effective judicial control, and genuine adversarial proceedings. It is demonstrated that the legal positions of the Constitutional Court of Ukraine serve not only as interpretative guidelines for courts and pre-trial investigation bodies, but also as normative catalysts for rethinking the fun-damental categories of evidence law–evidence, admissibility, inadmissibility, reliability, relevance, the judge’s inner conviction. These positions form the author’s concept of a «rigid constitutional core» of criminal procedural evidence, comprising at least seventeen articles of the Constitution of Ukraine and defining the value-based, institutional, and procedural boundaries of permissible evidentiary activity by the state. The article analyzes key decisions of the Constitutional Court of Ukraine concerning the right to liberty, privacy, legal assistance, access to case materials, the presumption of innocence, legal cer-tainty, the prohibition of assumptions, guarantees against arbitrary detention, as well as decisions de-claring unconstitutional the imperative or automatic models of restricting liberty, including during mar-tial law. Based on these decisions, the author reconstructs a comprehensive «constitutional matrix of evidence,» within which: the right to liberty and privacy sets the limits of permissible interference during evidence collection; the right to judicial protection and effective control establishes the obli-gation to exercise judicial oversight over any form of procedural coercion and to ensure immediate access to justice; the right to legal assistance and the privilege against self-incrimination determine the standards of voluntariness and authenticity of personal sources of evidence; the presumption of innocence defines the substance of evidentiary standards and precludes any «procedural automa-tism» in assessing evidence or applying restrictions on rights; the principle of the rule of law requires proportionality, legal certainty, and non-arbitrariness in criminal proceedings; and the principle of direct effect of the Constitution obliges courts to assess evidence through the prism of constitutional rights even in the absence of specific regulation in the CPC. The article emphasizes that these de-cisions set normative boundaries for the use of state coercion, define the institutional duty of courts to act as a constitutional guarantee mechanism, and provide grounds for the doctrinal consolidation of the concepts of substantive justice, proportionality, foreseeability, good faith, and the prohibition of «constitutional toxicity» of evidence and «constitutional defectiveness» of evidentiary arrays formed under unconstitutional restrictions of human rights. The article pays particular attention to the interplay between the case law of the Constitutional Court of Ukraine and the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights, which jointly struc-ture national standards of interference with privacy, liberty, access to justice, and the boundaries of permissible investigative and covert measures. It is shown that the integration of these standards produces a systemic reconfiguration of law enforcement practice, particularly in the areas of apply-ing preventive measures, judicial control over interferences with privacy, the implementation of the right to defence, the assessment of evidence, and the determination of the proper scope of judicial oversight. In this context, the article examines how the constitutional doctrine of proportionality, the requirement of real rather than formal judicial control, and the prohibition on the use of evidence ob-tained through torture or arbitrary deprivation of liberty bring the Ukrainian model of evidence closer to the European one, while at the same time preserving national specificity in the organization of pre-trial investigation, operational-search activities, and covert investigative (search) actions. The article concludes that the legal positions of the Constitutional Court of Ukraine constitute the intellectual and methodological core of the modern Ukrainian doctrine of evidence. They ensure the transition to a model in which evidentiary activity is understood as constitutionally justified state action aimed at safeguarding fairness and good faith in the criminal process, and the Criminal Procedure Code of Ukraine is conceived as a subsystem of constitutional legal order that must be interpreted and applied through the prism of the direct effect of the Constitution. As a result, a qualitatively new concept of evidence law is formed–one that complies with European standards, integrates the Con-vention-based approaches of the European Court of Human Rights, and simultaneously shapes a unique national tradition built upon the priorities of human dignity, the rule of law, and the supremacy of human rights over considerations of procedural or law-enforcement expediency.