The dissertation is a comprehensive and systemic study of the principles of criminal law, their historical origin, signs, properties, functions and ways of implementation in the current legislation of Ukraine and foreign countries.
The work consistently analyzes the methods and methods that made it possible to understand the principles as general, basic, initial provisions, means, rules that characterize the nature and social essence of the corresponding legal phenomenon, its direction and essential properties.
It is stated that legal principles are formulated in the norms-principles of law or are derived from the very spirit of law. They give purposefulness to the mechanism of legal regulation of public relations, reveal the place of law in public life.
It has been substantiated that the most essential features of the principles of law are: regulation; inner unity; objective conditioning; ideology; materialization; versatility; imperativeness; special general importance; historicity. Forming the main meaning of law, the principles receive all of its properties and functions.
It has been proven that the genesis of the principles of criminal law is not associated with specific dates, boundaries and periods, since the nature of these principles in different historical times had a changeable character. If in the early historical stages the principle of talion, monetary compensation or severe punishment was in effect, then the well-known spectrum of criminal law principles (at least general legal ones) was formed in theory and legislation only in the 19th and 20th centuries. Often the principles of criminal law were used for their own purposes by the political elite, sometimes the use of analogy, manipulation of the law on criminal liability was allowed.
It has been established that the systematization of the principles of criminal law presupposes the existence of their integral system, the optimal spectrum of which can be represented by such of them: general legal (legality; rule of law; social justice; humanism; equality of citizens before the law) sectoral (inevitability of criminal liability and other measures of criminal legal nature; guilty responsibility; individuals in the application of measures of a criminal-legal nature, the use of measures of a criminal-legal nature for committing a socially dangerous act defined in the Criminal Code; individualization of the application of measures of a criminal-legal nature; differentiation of measures of a criminal-legal nature); cross-sectoral (administration of justice only by a court; mandatory execution of court decisions; proven guilt; reasonable terms) institutional (proportionality of the punishment to the severity of the criminal offense, the circumstances of its commission and the person who committed it; the obligation of psychiatric treatment when applying medical measures) and inter-institutional (punitive influence); economy of punitive repression; compensation and elimination of harm caused) principles.
It has been proved that the principles of international criminal law constitute a system of scientifically formulated, extremely generalized ideas that express the requirements recognized by the world community on which international criminal law is based. If the principles are embodied in international legal norms, they acquire the value of a source of law, and if not, they perform ideological, political, regulatory, stabilizing, system-forming functions, significantly influencing the formation of national systems of criminal law principles.
Criminal law principles are reflected and content in acts of application and implementation of criminal law, which are the basis for the system of principles of criminal law. Each separate act of application or implementation of criminal law takes into account the corresponding set of principles that complement each other and provide law enforcement agencies with a comprehensive toolkit for reflecting objectively existing social relations in such acts.
Based on the results of the study, proposals were developed for a comprehensive legislative regulation of the principles of criminal law, on the basis of which a model of section I1 "Principles of Criminal Law" was proposed in the General Part of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, where it is necessary to place the relevant provisions in the context of Articles 2-1 – 2-8.
