Classification of official abuses in the digital environment and forms of their manifestation

Abstract

The article develops a matrix classification of official abuses in the digital environment and identifies a typology of their forms of manifestation on the empirical material of Ukrainian state registers and information systems. The thesis is substantiated that the digital transformation of public administration, accelerated by martial law and European integration commitments under the Ukraine–EU Association Agreement, modifies all three key elements of the corpus delicti under Articles 364–367 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine and corruption-related administrative offences: it expands the range of subjects to administrators of information systems and operators of registers, shifts the actus reus into the plane of action through electronic interfaces, and makes electronic data, metadata, and digital identities the object of encroachment. A classification matrix is formulated across five complementary criteria – subject, object, method of commission, digital instrumentation, and sphere of public administration – and the necessity of this approach instead of one-dimensional classifications is substantiated. The typology of forms of manifestation is developed through examples of raider re-registrations in the State Register of Property Rights, schemes in Prozorro, fictitious entries in the Unified State Electronic Database on Education, and manipulations with the automated distribution of court cases – forms that have evolved from electronic analogues of offline abuses to qualitatively new corpora delicti. The Ukrainian doctrine is juxtaposed with European standards (GDPR, NIS2, eIDAS 2.0, the Budapest Convention with its Second Additional Protocol, the case law of the CJEU in cases C-37/20 and C-601/20 and of the ECtHR in Big Brother Watch v. UK). Recommendations are formulated on the doctrinal demarcation of Articles 364 and 366 in the digital context, the rethinking of Article 367 in real-time mode, the introduction of the qualifying feature of "scalability", the full implementation of NIS2 with personal accountability of heads of state registrars, and the completion of GDPR transposition through the updated Law on Personal Data Protection.