Disclosure of testimony in the presence of substantial controversy

The article examines the institution of reading out testimony of participants in criminal proceedings in the presence of contradictions between the testimony given by the process participant and that given previously in court or at the pre-trial stage. The work presents the historical analysis of the process of generating the principle of immediacy of criminal proceedings in Russia and the principle of free assessment of evidence. A comparative legal analysis of the regulation of the institution of disclosure of previously given testimony in the USA, Germany, and Russia is performed in order to assess the influence of the criminal process model on the procedure for reading out previously given testimony. The authors concluded that the use of the wording “substantial controversy” in the norms of the Criminal Procedure Code of the Russian Federation (CPC RF), regulating the procedure for reading out testimony, creates uncertainty in practice while not being an adequate guarantee of ensuring equality of participants in criminal proceedings and the adversarial principle. In this regard, the authors propose a version of changes to the current regulation