Administrative and legal reform
Administrative and legal reform The disintegration of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s had as its objective consequence the emergence of new states on the political map of the world. The social cataclysms that caused economic collapse led to cultural, moral and ethical decline, as well as to …
Administrative and legal reform
The disintegration of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s had as its objective consequence the emergence of new states on the political map of the world. The social cataclysms that caused economic collapse led to cultural, moral and ethical decline, as well as to the degeneration of law.
The lack of a clear distinction between public and private relations and the ill-considered borrowing of legal norms into an imperfect post-Soviet social system led to the absence of a uniform interpretation of legal norms. The imperfection of legal norms was exploited first of all by those strata of society in which the levers of power were concentrated. In these circumstances, corruption, “telephone justice,” and “white-collar crime” became obstacles to all social transformations and, accordingly, factors that nullify all innovative changes taking place in the countries of the post-Soviet space.
The ideological foundations of the Soviet legal system did not stand the test of time. The hierarchical approach to building administrative law as a branch of law covering all spheres of public life proved to be mistaken. The degeneration of law into rigid governance of society by means of authoritative directives and administrative penalties led to the complete collapse and decline of the country.
The administrative liability of ordinary citizens for minor offenses, against a background of total disregard for the requirements of laws by representatives of the authorities and local self-government bodies, caused legal nihilism and the degradation of society. Today, “new” ways of reviving the norms and approaches to law and order in the sphere of public administration lead to a further deepening of crisis phenomena in society.
One of the directions of its foreign policy Ukraine has defined as joining European structures with the aim of creating a highly developed, law-based, civilized European state with a high standard of living, culture and democracy. The state and the citizen have both rights and duties toward each other. The basis of democratic development is the responsibility of the individual to society and of the state to citizens. Harmonization of legislation is the first step toward civil society.
Today legal scholars must develop such innovative models as enable society to increase the effectiveness of its activity and to resolve the evolutionary tasks facing it. Law is the practical implementation of conceptual models created to improve the life of both the individual and the development of modern civilization as a whole. The model of organizing the activity of public authorities should be based on studying the theoretical foundations of social development, identifying the errors characteristic of post-Soviet countries, and analyzing the achievements of the world's leading countries.
Another feature of Ukrainian law was, and unfortunately still is, a substantial deformation of its role. More precisely, two aspects of the social purpose of administrative law were absolutized: first, as a means of the state's managerial influence on social processes, that is, as the law of “administration”, and also as the law of “coercion”, which ensured that the state applied various means of administrative coercion in its relations with citizens.
To this day, unfortunately, many people perceive administrative law only in these aspects. Clearly, such a notion preserves the ideology of the “domination of the state” over the individual that is characteristic of a totalitarian society, in which the individual is merely a managed object targeted by the authoritative-directive influence and administrative coercion of state bodies.
Events of recent years and months prove that today it is extremely important to carry out a legal reform that will bring Ukraine's legal system closer to the law of European countries. Therefore, we must understand that the main function of modern administrative (managerial, state) law should manifest itself as regulatory in public-law relations and as protective in private-law relations.
Thus, Ukraine is currently being built as a democratic state governed by the rule of law, in which popular sovereignty is the highest social value. This requires updating the legal framework that regulates relations between the state and the individual, and therefore the “human-centered approach” is the basis for changes in legislation.
