REALIZATION OF THE RULE OF LAW PRINCIPLE IN THE APPLICATION OF THE LAW ON CRIMINAL LIABILITY: RAISING THE ISSUE, INTERNATIONAL AND FOREIGN EXPERIENCE
Journal Title: Юридичний науковий електронний журнал - Year 2017, Vol 5, Issue
Abstract
The article refers to the problem of the implementation of the rule of law principle in the application of criminal law, the relevance of which is seriously strengthened in Ukraine in connection with entering the provision on the rule of law in the administration of justice at the constitutional level in 2016. The reasons for this constitutional novel being ambiguously perceived by the local legal community are discovered. In particular, it is pointed at the disputed nature of the rule of law as a legal concept and at the versatility of this legal principle. It is noted that the affiliation of Ukrainian legal system with the Roman-Germanic (continental) legal system and the traditional, within its bounds, priority of the law over other sources of law, including the judicial precedent, does not exclude the search for acceptable limits of borrowing elements from other legal families, caused by globalization and integration processes. The thesis on the inappropriateness of contrasting Roman-Germanic and Anglo-American legal systems in the context of clarifying the primacy of the phenomenon of the rule of law is substantiated. It is stated that the idea of establishing the rule of law in law enforcement seems to be quite logical in the context of Ukraine’s aspirations towards European integration. It is proved that the history of jurisprudence helps to answer the question of how a judge or other law enforcer should act when he sees that in a given situation the formal compliance with the law will lead to obvious injustice and will obviously violate the basic principles of the rule of law. International and foreign experience of realization of the rule of law principle in the application of the law on criminal liability are covered. In particular, the essence of the “Radbruch’s formula” is revealed, its application in international and national judicial practice is demonstrated. The mentioned experience proves, among other things, that there have been criminal cases in the practice of international and foreign judicial bodies where courts gave preference to the principle of the rule of law against written laws or interpreted the latter in a manner consistent with the requirements of the rule of law, despite the fact that it went beyond the literal content of certain normative legal acts. As such, the question of implementing the rule of law in criminal law is not just a theoretical concept, but a rather real practice of international and national courts. It is shown that solving the question on when the court may deviate from the “letter” of the law to ensure the implementation of the rule of law into life, and when such a departure, on the contrary, violates this principle, is an extremely difficult matter even for authoritative judicial institutions, including the European Court of human rights. In this regard, Ukrainian judges and other lawyers should not perceive the researched problem in a simple manner, inclined to just one extreme: either to unambiguously recognize the full advantage of the principle of legality before the principle of the rule of law at the stage of law enforcement or, conversely, to the belief that the judge can at any moment quite easily refuse to apply the law under the pretext of their own, perhaps completely subjective ideas of justice. If the first extreme poses threat of the formal legalization by the law of the highest injustice, to which the judicial power cannot resist (“law is law”), then the second also threatens to arbitrarily violate the principle of the separation of powers and affirmation of injustice due to the unequal application of the law to different people in similar situations. That is why the withdrawal by the court from the “letter” of the law is possible, but the court must do so with extreme caution, giving proper and thorough motivation.
Authors and Affiliations
О. О Дудоров, М. В Мазур
Keywords
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