Legal Certainty as a Basic Principle of the Land Law of Ukraine

Abstract

The principle of legal certainty is a general principle of law. It takes its origin from Ancient Greece and Rome. Greeks used legal certainty as a main criterion for just legislation, but Romans understood it as a requirement for judicial activities. Modern requirements of the legal certainty principle have the same spheres of usage – legislative and judiciary. The main of them are the following: restrictions must be provided for a specific legal act, which is public, predictable and general, clearly formulated, has legitimate public interest; clear division of powers and responsibilities; enforcement must be unique and predictable. Nowadays, legal certainty is a generally recognized democratic value that is part of the European common heritage. The European Court of Human Rights has a great influence on the legal certainty formation. It has stable practice of using the legal certainty principle in different spheres. The ECHR has developed legal certainty to the level that it has now.
Legal certainty begins to penetrate into the Ukrainian legal system. Nowadays, this process is very slow and developed only by the scholars and the Constitutional Court of Ukraine. From the other hand, uprising of the rule of law and other fundamental principles of law application is moving in a positive way. This positive tendency could be found not only in constitutional law, but also in different branches of law, such as land law. The Constitutional Court of Ukraine tries to use the concept of “living instrument” that was established by the ECHR in Tyrer v. The United Kingdom case. The majority of legal certainty requirements in land sphere are connected to the legislative usage. Predictability of the acts and legislative policy is the most problematic aspect of the legal certainty implementation in Ukraine.