Bill No. 15488-3 limits warrantless searches but adds a filter on crime reports

The urgent search was meant to be an exception. Article 30 of the Constitution guarantees the inviolability of the home and allows entry without a court decision only in urgent cases connected with saving human life and property or with the direct pursuit of suspects. The Criminal Procedure Code reproduced this formula in Part 3 of Article 233. But over the years the Code has been in force, the exception has turned into a convenient working tool: go in first, then explain to the investigating judge why it was impossible to wait. That is why the question of where “urgency” ends stopped being academic long ago, and that is why Parliament has taken it up once again.

On October 28, the Verkhovna Rada adopted in first reading Bill No. 15488-3, authored by Serhii Ionushas, chair of the Committee on Law Enforcement. 265 MPs voted in favor. The full title of the document is “On Amendments to the Criminal Procedure Code of Ukraine to Improve the Institutions of Searches in Urgent Cases, as well as the Registration of Statements and Reports of Committed Criminal Offenses.” The second half of that title is precisely the nuance that deserves a closer look than the first.

Where the bill came from

The immediate trigger was the judgment of the European Court of Human Rights of July 10, 2025, in Korniyets and Others v. Ukraine. The Court found a violation of Article 8 of the Convention, the right to respect for one’s home, as well as Article 13, the right to an effective remedy.

Interestingly, the ECHR did not reproach Ukrainian investigators for delay. In the episodes it examined, they applied for retrospective authorization roughly within 1-2 days of the search. The problem lay elsewhere. Whether a situation was truly urgent was assessed by the investigators and prosecutors themselves. Judicial review was triggered at the investigator’s initiative and conducted without the homeowner. The investigating judges’ rulings, the Court found, amounted to general phrases that essentially copied the prosecution’s applications. And a person could not appeal such a ruling at all, because the Code provides no appeal against a search order. Hence Strasbourg’s conclusion: the applicants had no adequate and effective safeguards against arbitrariness, and therefore the interference was not in accordance with the law.

The history of Article 233 itself is telling as well. In the summer of 2025, Bill No. 12414 narrowed the grounds for searches without a warrant, and some lawyers called it a progressive step. Yet less than 2 weeks later, when the powers of NABU and SAP were restored by Law No. 13533, the wording of the article, as the Judicial and Legal Newspaper noted, was returned to its previous version. After that, the base Bill No. 15488 and four alternatives were registered in Parliament. The committee recommended rejecting all of them except its own chair’s draft.

What changes for searches

Now to the substance. According to the summary of the changes, Bill No. 15488-3 amends Articles 169, 214, 233, 234, 303 and 309 of the Criminal Procedure Code.

The main innovation concerns the deadline. The current wording of Part 3 of Article 233 obliges the prosecutor or investigator to apply to the investigating judge for a search warrant “immediately” after entering a home. The word is an evaluative one, and practice has filled it with very different meanings. The bill keeps “immediately” but adds an upper limit: no later than 72 hours.

The investigating judge, as now, must check not only whether a search is justified but also whether there really were grounds to enter without a warrant. Applications will be considered within 3 days of reaching the court, and now with the participation of the owner of the property, the owner of the home, or their representatives. The judge must notify them in advance of the date, time and place of the hearing, although their failure to appear does not halt the proceedings.

The fate of seized items is regulated separately. The amendments to Article 169 directly require the property to be returned if the prosecutor deems the seizure groundless or refuses to approve the search application, and also if the investigating judge rejects such an application. For practitioners this is no small matter. Today, property seized during an urgent search often is not treated as temporarily seized within the meaning of the Code at all, and it can be held without clear time limits.

Finally, the amendments to Article 309 open an appeal against investigating judges’ rulings authorizing an urgent search or refusing to do so.

One common misunderstanding is worth clearing up. The inadmissibility of evidence obtained in a search that the prosecutor did not approve or the court did not validate, and the destruction of the information obtained under Article 255 of the Code, are not innovations of the bill. This sanction is already written into the current Part 3 of Article 233. What is new is something else: the owner’s participation, the appeal, and the mechanism for returning property. And it is exactly these three elements that directly answer the defects the ECHR found in the Korniyets case.

The price of 72 hours

Still, the 72-hour deadline raises questions, and legal commentators are raising them. The alternative bills proposed 24 hours and even 6 hours. The committee chose the longest option.

Imagine an ordinary situation. Investigators enter an apartment at night and seize laptops, phones and documents. They have three days to go to court. The court has up to 3 more days to consider the application. So for up to a week a person may live without their belongings, not knowing whether the state will recognize what was done to them as lawful. Most importantly, law enforcement gets a sizable window to paper over and justify actions already taken.

This is where a familiar legislative trap shows itself: an upper limit has a habit of becoming the norm. The word “immediately” at least in theory forced the judge to ask why the application was not filed at once. The figure 72 hands the investigators a ready answer: the law allows it. Recall that in the Korniyets case investigators managed within 1-2 days. The new deadline formally legitimizes a longer pause than in the episodes Strasbourg has already examined.

There is also an asymmetry the bill leaves in place. An appeal opens only against rulings on urgent searches. An ordinary search warrant, which the investigating judge issues without the homeowner present, remains unappealable as before. In other words, a person whose home was entered without a court order will get more procedural rights than a person whose home was entered with a warrant issued behind closed doors.

The nuance hidden in the title

Now to the main point. The bill amends Article 214 of the Criminal Procedure Code, that is, the very point of entry into criminal proceedings.

The current Part 1 of Article 214 obliges the investigator, inquirer or prosecutor to enter information into the Unified Register of Pre-Trial Investigations immediately, and no later than 24 hours after a statement or report of a criminal offense is filed. Part 4 explicitly prohibits refusing to accept and register a statement. This automatism was a deliberate choice of the 2012 Code. The old code had the “pre-investigation check” and the decision to refuse to open a case, and for years that very filter served as a tool for making inconvenient complaints quietly vanish into desk drawers.

Under Bill No. 15488-3, the obligation to enter information into the Register will arise upon receipt of a statement or report containing “sufficient data” on the elements of a criminal offense.

It is clear where this idea comes from. Automatic registration gave rise to an industry of commissioned cases. Anyone could file a report of a crime that never happened, get a number in the Register, and then came the searches, account freezes and pressure on business. Lawyers have for years called Article 214 a tool for destroying competitors. Moreover, the Supreme Court in its case law has already proceeded from the premise that a statement must contain specific information about an offense, not just any assertion by the complainant.

But the “sufficient data” formula in this form raises more questions than it answers. First: who assesses sufficiency. The answer is obvious: the same investigator, inquirer or prosecutor who received the statement. Second: by what criteria. The described amendments contain none. Notably, back in 2025, when a similar formula was being discussed in Bill No. 12439, the Ukrainian National Bar Association proposed tying “sufficiency” to the list of information entered into the Register under Part 5 of Article 214. In other words, giving the official at least a formal checklist. Third: what happens to a statement found to contain “insufficient” data. As Informator points out, the bill gives no answer. No deadline, no form of decision, no duty to inform the complainant.

Tellingly, the drafters themselves acknowledge the risk of a return to the practice of preliminary checks, where registration would depend on a subjective reading of the statement’s content. So the risk is seen, but no mechanism to contain it is offered.

A filter plus narrowed appeals

A filter in itself does not mean arbitrariness, if an effective remedy stands beside it. Today such a remedy exists: paragraph 1 of Part 1 of Article 303 of the Code allows a complaint to the investigating judge about inaction consisting in the failure to enter information into the Register. For years this complaint has been the main lever with which citizens forced law enforcement to at least open an investigation.

The bill changes that too. It will be possible to challenge inaction in failing to enter information after receiving a statement “with sufficient data,” and the cases in which a refusal to enter information can be challenged are being restricted. That is, sufficiency is assessed by the official, while the door to the investigating judge narrows.

And here it is worth returning to the very case used to justify the reform. The judgment in Korniyets and Others v. Ukraine contains the episode of the applicant Zhabo, who complained of ill-treatment during the search of her home. As scholars describe this case, the information about the ill-treatment made it into the Register only through a ruling of an investigating judge. That is, precisely through the Article 303 mechanism that is now proposed to be narrowed. Without it, a person’s complaint about being beaten during a search could easily have remained “insufficient” in the eyes of the colleagues of those who carried out that search.

Such complainants are the ones most at risk. Complaints about the actions of law enforcement officers themselves, reports of crimes by officials, statements from victims who have no lawyer and cannot set out the circumstances in the language of a police report. A strong business with legal support will draft its statement so that no one can fault its “sufficiency.” A person shoved in the chest during a night search hardly will.

Two reforms in one document

So Bill No. 15488-3 actually contains two different reforms. The first, on searches, broadly moves in the direction the ECHR demands: the homeowner gets a place at the hearing, a right of appeal and a clear mechanism for the return of property. The 72-hour deadline remains debatable, but that is a question of a number that can be fixed.

The second reform, on the registration of statements, is of an entirely different nature. It returns to the official the discretion that the 2012 Code deliberately abandoned, and at the same time narrows judicial control over that discretion. These two changes come as a package, and so in the voting chamber the amendments to Article 214 passed under the banner of protecting human rights during searches.

Before the second reading, the committee will have quite specific questions on its table. Will the notion of “sufficient data” receive statutory criteria rather than just an official’s assessment? Will there be a procedure for statements deemed insufficient: a deadline, a reasoned decision, notice to the complainant? And will Article 303 retain a full right to challenge a refusal to register? If the answers are negative, the result will be a paradox: a person whose home was entered without a court order will gain the right to challenge the search, but may lose the right to have their complaint about those who carried it out even reach the Register.