Politinių partijų teisinio statuso raidos antroji pakopa

Abstract

In 1935 published reasoning of M. Romeris, the founder of Lithuanian constitutional law science, as to the significance of jurisprudence research of political parties has not been paid the adequate attention until now. At present a notably favourable situation has emerged to effectively exclude this gap. The legislation of Seimas in 2004 allows to speak about the “second generation” of the legal status of political parties in a view that the regulation of financing of political parties and its control was codified and essentially improved (in the shape of mini-code “The Law on Financing of Political Parties and Political Campaigns and Control of Financing”), also a new wording of the Law on Political Parties was approved, which, unfortunately, reduced the amount of rules of public law specifically addressed to political parties and directed more at the provisions of the Civil Code. These new trends are worth of special note of the constitutional law science because the abovementioned modification of the Law on Political Parties was effected by the development of civil law, to be precise – by the entrance into force of the new Civil Code, which referred political parties as public legal persons, as well as by the operation of the Register of Legal Persons. On the one hand, following the spirit of the Constitution of the Republic of Lithuania, political parties should not be over linked to the system of civil law and identified as other legal persons included in the list of legal persons registered by the state enterprise “Centre of Registers”. On the other hand, one may doubt if the public legal capacity of political parties, established by the legislation body, formally is consistent with the Constitution (Article 35), under which political parties (expressis verbis) are referred not to the grounds of organisation of the state, but to the subjective possibilities of citizens. Overall, the second stage of the development of the legal status of political parties is full of negotiable aspects that should not be left only as a research object to the political science.