Kleshchenko N. Unification of legislation: theoretical and applied aspects.

The thesis paper is dedicated to the complex research of theoretical and applied aspects of the unification of legislation. The urgency of such issue is due to the fact that unification is the process, which can improve the quality of the legislation. This process became more urgent from the moment of the Ukrainian state official declaration of the strategic policy of the European integration and undertaking the responsibilities to reform all the national legislation and make it correspondent to the EU law. The paper reveals historical aspect of the unification process, the research of which begins from the time Ukraine became independent, that is since 1991. Two periods of the legislation unification process in Ukraine were distinguished, notably: 1) from 1994 (from the moment of signing the Partnership and Cooperation Agreement between Ukraine and the European Union) till 2013; 2) since 2014 till the present, which is the result of signing the EU Association Agreement. The notion of «unification» was characterized and a closer definition of this notion was made as the process of legislation regulation by changing the old or the adoption of new regulatory legal acts and the implementation of the latter in the national law of a particular country with the purpose of equal regulation of social relations in different legal systems. The types of unification and its classification were researched. Doctrinal unification and its subtype – official doctrinal unification were distinguished. It is offered to supplement the classification range with the following criteria: 1) by the subjects of conduct (unification of legislative and regulatory acts of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, unification of legislative and regulatory acts of the President of Ukraine, unification of legislative and regulatory acts of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine etc.) and 2) by hierarchy of legislative system creation (unification of legislative acts, unification of by-laws). The paper determines two approaches to the unification of legal terminology: 1) theoretical and conceptual; 2) structural. The thesis formulates the notion of «unification of legal definitions», which is regarded as the process of harmonizing the definitions of legal terms, which define the content and essential features of the terms and relevant legal phenomena in order to reach their best possible semantic certainty. Specific proposals regarding the organization of the process of legislation unification were made: 1) creation of a specialized expert committee which would study the prospects of the legislation unification and submit proposals on the adoption, modifications and repealing of the legislative and regulatory acts; 2) revealing the present inaccuracies, contradictions, discrepancies (on the basis of analysis of the legislative and regulatory acts, which regulate a certain sphere of social relations) and systematization in order to eliminate them; 3) submitting proposals on the introducing amendments to legislative acts, which regulate a certain sphere of social relations and the creation of a new unified act with compulsory implementation of relevant international rules, which regulate a certain sphere of social relations.