Nestor V. Municipal Government in Ukraine and in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland: Comparative Study

The study solves a scientific problem, which is to formulate proposals for the reception of the UK experience for further Ukrainian municipal legislation improvement. The conducted comparative-constitutional study is international in its level (European), according to the sectoral direction – intra-sectoral, according to the degree of detailing of the applied legal provisions – institutional. The paper presents a comparative analysis of self-government in Ukrainian cities and in the cities of such a part of the United Kingdom as England. Among the most important conclusions and proposals of the dissertation should be considered appropriate the following. The comparability of self-government in urban settlements of Ukraine and the United Kingdom is justified by: − coincidence in essence of two important periods of development of urban self-government in these states – first, the period of the highest prosperity of urban self-government – the Middle Ages, and second, the period of emergence of local self-government in the studied countries (respectively, urban self-government); for Ukraine it is the 1990s, for the United Kingdom it is the 1880s, the period of the “British municipal revolution”; − coincidence of most elements of the state form in relation to the analyzed countries (in particular, Ukraine and the United Kingdom are unitary states); − a successful combination in the United Kingdom of respect for the ancient traditions of urban self-government with the application of the most modern approaches to its reform; − wide implementation in the current regulations and case law of both states of European municipal standards. It is proved that analogs of Ukrainian “misto” in the United Kingdom are such settlements as ‘cities’. It is emphasized that at the present stage in the United Kingdom the settlements are classified as a city by the monarch's charter on the basis of the criterion of “population”, which distinguishes them from towns - administrative-territorial units, which can be both urban and rural. Based on the generalization of the British experience, it is recommended to adopt an approach in Ukraine that would provide a clear criterion for classifying settlements as cities, and noted that the republican form of government and the absence of charters as one of the types of acts of the President make it impossible to fully accept the successful British approach. However, it is possible to adapt it to the Ukrainian realities and to refer the administrative-territorial unit to the number of cities on the basis of only one objective criterion – the population.