Pysarenko N. Conceptual Bases of Administrative Proceedings in Ukraine.

The thesis is devoted to development of conceptual bases of administrative proceedings, disclosure of their content and establishing their correlative relations for solving the problem of normative reflection of these bases in the national administrative procedural law, substantiation of proposals for improvement of the law and practice of its application. Ideas, that determine the assignment of this form of justice, have a fundamental impact on the content of the rules that establish powers of the administrative court and rights and obligations of the participants in the case, outline the course of action that is consistently committed in the judicial process and forms it as a whole, are recognized as the conceptual bases of administrative proceedings. Such bases have been defined to be the ideas of the rule of law and a fair trial. These ideas are interrelated and interdependent. The rule of law is represented by a set of mandatory elements (requirements). The implementation of each of these elements is ensured in judicial proceedings through the guarantees of a fair trial, which are enshrined in Art. 6 of the 1950 Convention on the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms and should be reflected in its (judicial proceedings) principles. It has been substantiated that administrative proceedings as a form of execution of judicial power is based on the idea of the rule of law if the following requirements are observed: (a) justice in administrative cases must be accessible and the administrative court must be independent and impartial; (b) the administrative court must strictly comply with the law, act solely within the limits of its powers, exercising which (c) it must render reasonable, just, well grounded and devoid of any grounds for unreasonable discretion judgments; (d) when considering the case, the administrative court must apply the law equally to all; (h) its final decisions cannot be challenged and must be strictly enforced. Demands of the rule of law made for administrative proceedings obtain further development of justice in respect to the guarantees of a fair trial, which are enshrined in Art. 6 of the Convention and are interpreted in the judgments of the European Court of Human Rights. Fair trial guarantees are presented by three groups, namely, guarantees of (a) access to justice, (b) organizational and (c) procedural ones. Provisions of the administrative procedural law, which must first reflect the guarantees of a just court, and thus absorb the rule of law, are those of the principles of administrative proceedings. It is justified that full implementation of the guarantees of a fair trial in the national administrative procedural law is possible in case of normative consolidation of the updated list of administrative proceedings principles. Such list should include the following principles: 1) access to justice in administrative cases; 2) prohibition of discrimination (equality of participants before the trial); 3) independence and impartiality of the administrative court; 4) publicity of a trial; 5) legality; 6) equality of parties to the case before the law; 7) competitiveness of the case participants; 8) dispositivity; 9) official clarification of all circumstances in the case; 10) ensuring the right to appellate review; 11) ensuring the right to cassational appeal against a court decision; 12) validity of the court decision; 13) reasonableness of the time limits for resolution of administrative cases.