Etymological approach to defining procedural rules of the ECHR through the prism of Ukrainian and foreign dictionaries

The article examines the problem of defining procedural rules (fair trial rules or rules) of the European Court of Human Rights, which it uses in criminal proceedings to assess the fairness and effectiveness of trials in national courts. A study of the practice of the ECHR over more than six decades has shown that the supranational court does not offer a definition of the concept of «rule». One of the difficulties in implementing the procedural rules of the ECHR, the authors established, is the lack of a definition of this concept in the practice of the supranational body. A problem arose in the study of this concept. The first step in solving the highlighted problem was to clarify the legal essence of the concept of «rule» in Ukrainian and foreign dictionaries. The need is also caused by the fact that the Criminal Procedure Code of Ukraine does not include the concept of «rule» in the list of basic terms, although it is found in the text of individual articles. The following approach was used in the study: the structure of the concept of «rule» in Ukrainian and foreign dictionaries was studied; this structure was used as the basis for a model of the concept of «rule» in criminal proceedings. Based on the content of the components of the concept of «rule» in criminal proceedings and their synthesis, a legal definition of this concept was established. To avoid errors in revealing the content of the proposed definitions, we relied on the general approach to defining any concept offered by the science of «Logic». In addition, the proposed definitions were checked for consistency by comparison. Finally: we managed to propose several legal definitions of the concept of «fair trial rules.» Some of them are as follows. A rule is a set of procedural actions of the court that determine the procedure for conducting a trial in criminal proceedings, aimed at maintaining its fairness based on the balance of evidence for the prosecution and defense. A rule is a set of procedural actions of the court developed by the ECHR to regulate the course of a trial in order to ensure fairness to the parties to criminal proceedings. A rule is a procedural guideline that directs a court, under specific circumstances, to conduct a fair trial in a criminal proceeding.