Ensuring the State’s Legal Liability is the Key Challenge of Legal Reform in the Modern Ukraine

Abstract

Special attention has been paid to the fact that the doctrine of legal liability of the state to a person is increasingly affirmed in Ukraine as a theoretical basis for the functioning of state power in general and all its agencies in particular. However, despite the large number of scientific developments, the national legal science still can not boast of an unambiguous and generally recognized understanding of the essence of the phenomenon of legal liability of the state.
 It has been stressed that legal liability was interpreted for a long time as a kind of “continuation” of the state itself: in the context of the concept of state coercion means it was solely perceived as an instrument of state power for punishing offenders. However, such a concept denied the question about legal liability of the state itself as an equal personality of the subject of law.
 It has been stated that the phenomenon of legal liability of the state one can consider a certain continuation of the political and legal strategy on self-limitation of the state by law. Such liability is naturally considered a characteristic feature of the legal type of statehood, and it directly concerns only the democratic type of states. Instead, undemocratic states do not bear or acknowledge (or only declare) any real legal liability to society. Therefore, in terms of a democracy, the state is a real subject of liability to society, which is guaranteed on the normative and institutional levels.
 The current stage of development of the institution of legal liability of the state is characterized by the highest normative level of its institutionalization – constitutional one. This level ensures: 1) the irreversibility of the state’s course on the establishment of legal statehood; 2) fixing the starting, the main elements of the normative model of legal liability of the state; 3) completion of the registration of legal personality of the state in the modern world, which was incomplete without constitutional establishment of its legal liability; 4) the parity nature of the relations of the state with other subjects of law on the basis of a combination of dispositive and imperative, public and private components. The constitutional model of the state’s legal liability to a human being is based on the same principles in Ukraine. Such liability, in particular, is not limited to the political or moral liability of public authorities to society, but has the features of legal liability as applying measures of public and legal (constitutional or international) nature to the state and its agencies for the failure or improper performance of the duties.