Limitation of labor rights under martial law

Abstract

The author focuses on the issue of restrictions on particular rights and freedoms through the prism of the provisions of the Constitution of Ukraine and international legal acts, the peculiarities of the mechanism of limiting the right to work and the right to strike as well as the problems of their provision during a state of war. The introduction of the legal regime of martial law in Ukraine provided a legal opportunity to limit the number of individual and collective labour rights and human freedoms temporarily. As for the right to strike, in the conditions of martial law, its implementation is impossible at all, which allows us to assert not just about its limitations, but actually about the temporary cancellation of such a right. Based on the international legal and constitutional principles of limiting human rights, any restrictions must at least comply with the principles of legal certainty and predictability, the requirements of legality, necessity, proportionality, and be non-discriminatory. Despite this, the analysis of the legal regulation of restrictions on labour rights and guarantees in the conditions of martial law indicates the presence of individual both terminological and substantive contradictions and shortcomings of the legal acts by which such restrictions are introduced. With the adoption of the Law of Ukraine “On the Organization of Labour Relations in the Conditions of Martial Law”, which limits the number of constitutional rights and freedoms of a person and a citizen by Articles 43 and 44 of the Constitution of Ukraine, the problems of law enforcement in labour law became more acute due to the presence of several legal acts, which regulate relations in the labour sphere differently. Given this, one of the primary tasks of the state in the post-war future should be to fully restore and ensure the realization of constitutional human rights and freedoms, as well as human-oriented and effective reform of the social and labour spheres. Key words: labour rights, right to work, right to strike, restrictions of rights, martial law.