PROBLEMS AND PROSPECTS OF CONDUCTING MOLECULAR GENETIC RESEARCH FOR THE IDENTIFICATION OF PERSONS WHO WENT MISSING OR DIED DURING THE HOSTILITIES IN THE OCCUPIED TERRITORIES OF UKRAINE

Анотація

Presented modern conceptual, methodological, technical achievements and regulatory developments for the identification of persons who have gone missing or died during hostilities, and suggest ways of improvement. Identification of unknown victims is one of the most difficult tasks of forensic medicine. DNA analysis is one of the "gold standards" that can be used to confirm the identity by comparing the profile of an unknown person with both the DNA profile during life (from genomic information databases) and with biological relatives. The development of DNA databases has contributed to the identification of missing persons and the development of investigative versions to assist law enforcement agencies.
Since May 2023, the Unified Register of Missing Persons has been operational in Ukraine, which includes all data on missing military personnel. Previously, the Law "On State Registration of Human Genomic Information" was adopted, which regulates the procedures for creating, recording and maintaining the registry of a person's genomic information, improves the efficiency of the work of law enforcement agencies and provides for two options for the registration of human genomic information - mandatory state and voluntary. Also, the Law significantly simplifies the process of identifying missing military personnel.
The Law does not ensure the transparent and independent work of forming the registry databases, which creates potential corruption risks, creates the possibility of information misuse, in particular, its transfer to other persons or bodies for another purpose. The Law does not detail/clarify a number of issues: minimizing the risks of access to personal data of relatives of a missing person after establishing the death of this person by destroying genomic information; it is necessary to ensure and finalize procedures for monitoring compliance with the law in the work of the registry; develop a procedure for accessing the register by other authorities to prevent misuse of this data. It is proposed to supplement Part 2 of Article 84 of the Criminal Procedure Code of Ukraine as a new source of evidence - "information from DNA databases".