Kovalenko B. The Legal Nature of Standards as Sources of Environmental Law

The dissertation is devoted to the complex study of the legal nature of environmental standards, their impact on the development of environmental legislation, is an independent scientific work, which covers by author’s ideas and developments. Based on the analysis of the norms of international, European and national legislation of Ukraine, as well as the provisions of general theoretical and special legal literature, the place of standards in the system of sources of environmental law of Ukraine is determined. The necessity to include normative and technical documents in the sources of environmental law, namely, state, international and European environmental standards as containing ecological and legal ideas, is grounded, and their provisions, in combination with legislative acts, specify the pace and direction of development of the field of environmental law. Environmental standards and legal norms are part of a single mechanism for regulating legal relationships and act only together to achieve a single goal – to ensure the safety of the environment. The scientific and legislative approaches to the understanding of standards as sources of environmental law of Ukraine are analyzed, their concepts and legal features are revealed. The historical way of development of ecological standards as a necessary step for the large-scale development of industry while simultaneously maintaining the proper quality of the environment is investigated and systematized. The trends of standardization on the territory of the USSR and the EU are compared, the modern system of ecological standards, types and features of legal regulation of their development and approval are considered. The international and European ecological standards and their influence on the development of legislation, national standards and environmental law of Ukraine as a whole are researched. The organizational and legal mechanism of development of international and European environmental standards and the procedure for their implementation in Ukraine is shown. The problems and perspectives of the influence of international and European standards on improvement of the environmental legislation of Ukraine are revealed. It is substantiated the inadmissibility of cancellation, the obligatory adherence to environmental standards and the voluntary application of their application.