The concept of transitional justice has been associated with the periods of political change when a country emerges from a war or turmoil and attempts to address the wrongdoings of the past. Among various instruments of transitional justice, truth commissions stand out as an example of a non-judicial form of addressing the crimes of the past. While their setup and operation can be criticized on different grounds, including excessive politization of hearings and the virtual impossibility of meaningfully assessing their impact, it has been widely acknowledged in the literature that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa can be regarded as a success story due to its relatively strong mandate and widespread coverage and resonance it had in South African society. We would like to compare this commission from the 1990s with a more recent example, the Brazilian National Truth Commission, so as to be able to address the question of incorporation of gendered aspects in transitional justice (including examination of sexual violence cases, representation of women in truth-telling bodies, etc.), since gender often remains an overlooked and silenced aspect in such initiatives. Gendered narratives of transitional justice often do not fit into the wider narratives of post-war reconciliation. A more general question addressed in this research is whether the lack of formal procedure in truth commissions facilitates or hinders examination of sexual crimes in transitional settings.

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Thomas Kuhn in his remarkable work "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" managed to show that the historical approach to the study of changes in scientific knowledge gives other data than is generally considered correct in this science. This important conclusion allows us to investigate the evolution of scientific knowledge, and it is possible and necessary to do this not only in physics (as in Kuhn's work) but also in humanitarian directions or in social sciences. Understanding the meaning of the term "paradigm" introduced by Kuhn makes it possible to identify those theories that have a significant impact on related fields of knowledge. We will try to show the essential content of the paradigm, the scientific community from the positions of T. Kuhn and other scientists of philosophers and sociologists, and also we will perform some analysis of the application of these concepts to the science of law.

The purpose of this study is a comparative legal analysis of international legal and domestic norms governing international cooperation in criminal proceedings in the Eurasian space, identify gaps and conflicts, formulat- ing proposals for the harmonization and unification of the legal foundations of cooperation. The methodolog- ical basis of this work was a systematic approach to comparative analysis, reflecting the state of legal regula- tion of international cooperation in criminal proceedings at the international and domestic levels, combined with a theoretical and legal study of the identified problems. In a separate direction, the authors extracted the “unique” norms of the criminal procedure codes of the states of the region, substantiating their progressive- ness and formulating proposals for their extrapolation into international treaty norms and the domestic law of states. The study led to the conclusion about the heterogeneity of the legal regulation of international coopera- tion in criminal proceedings and the multi-level implementation of international norms. The main results of the study are the identification of existing gaps and conflicts, the formulation of clear proposals for their elim- ination, as well as for the improvement of existing legal norms. The main conclusion that the authors formu- lated in the process of working on the topic is the actualization of the revision of international treaties govern- ing cooperation in the field of criminal proceedings (legal assistance in criminal cases), their innovation and further implementation in the domestic law of the states of the Eurasian region.