Review

The article states that the armed aggression against Ukraine has resulted in an unprecedented scale of core international crimes, which necessitates technically standardised and effective mech-anisms for the collection, verification, analysis, and preservation of digital evidence. The formation of a unified evidentiary environment through the use of materials from the Core International Crimes Evidence Database (CICED) becomes crucial for documenting war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, and the crime of aggression. The purpose of the article is to conduct a comprehensive examination of the legal foundations for the establishment and functioning of CICED, to determine its role in proving core international crimes, to identify issues concerning the admissibility of CICED materials, and to develop scientifi-cally grounded proposals for their normative implementation into the criminal procedural legislation of Ukraine. The study relies on international and national legal instruments, empirical data from domestic and international jurisdictions, and academic sources. Its methodology is based on a combination of general scientific, special legal, and interdisciplinary methods, which together ensured a systematic and comprehensive analysis of the legal, procedural, and technological aspects of using CICED ma-terials in the prosecution of core international crimes. It has been demonstrated that the international digital platform CICED, operating within the legal mandate of the European Union Agency for Criminal Justice Cooperation (Eurojust), ensures the technical processing of digital evidentiary materials, which includes: the recording of metadata and timestamps; cryptographic protection and hashing; the tagging and verification of file integrity; struc-tured storage in a secure environment; and the formation of technical linkages between individual materials to facilitate their analysis in the course of international investigations. The study establishes CICED’s interaction with joint investigation teams, the International Centre for the Prosecution of the Crime of Aggression, the International Criminal Court, Europol, the Euro-pean Public Prosecutor’s Office, as well as national law-enforcement and prosecutorial authorities. It concludes that the current criminal procedure legislation of Ukraine does not contain a special mechanism for incorporating digital evidence of international origin, including CICED materials, which creates risks of their inadmissibility. The article proposes introducing into national legislation legal provisions defining the concept, criteria of reliability, procedures for authentication and use of digital evidence of international origin, and establishing a state register of international evidence to ensure compatibility with international institutional platforms.