UNIVERSALISING THE LEGAL REGULATION OF NAVAL FORCES
Authors: Borysov Ievgen 
Published: April 2023

It is impossible to study the development of the legal regulation of naval forces without analysing the supranational legal component. Although the law of the sea, as defined above, has traditionally had an international private and public legal dimension, the relevant sources have for a long time been primarily customary and concerned primarily the commercial exploitation of the sea and merchant shipping. All references to the maritime power of states and their rights at sea in this dimension did not concern aspects of the specificities of military activity at sea. In fact, both normative references and doctrinal reflections on international, supranational standards of naval activity only began to emerge in the nineteenth century. The purpose of the article is to define the legal acts for the administrative regulation of the naval forces and to formulate approaches to universalising their definition based on the ontology of holistic approaches to legal regulation and doctrine making. Methodology. This study applies the methodology of interdisciplinary comparison, methods of content analysis and integration of heterogeneous features into the system, which allowed to obtain a new scientific approach, namely to characterise the legal regulation of naval forces in the context of its universalisation and to consider the formation of maritime policy in the future, including the national one. The main impetus for the development of holistic approaches to this type of activity should be seen in the adoption of bilateral and collective intergovernmental agreements on maritime issues, in particular. In particular, it is possible to refer to the documents that initiated the standardisation of the treatment of neutral and enemy ships at sea, which can be traced back to 1780. In addition, military and legal practice, especially in the context of the Black Sea Straits regime, has repeatedly raised the issue of determining the criteria for the affiliation of a particular ship to the navy. In the course of the nineteenth century, a significant number of bilateral treaties regulating aspects of naval cooperation were developed, taking into account the practice of national unilateral acts and decisions of courts martial and tribunals, and then became the subject of research by relevant scholars who were closely involved in naval practice and, at the same time, in the formation of norms. Results. The author concludes that at the supranational level, the issues of regulating the activities of naval forces have been traced in the treaty dimension since the late eighteenth century, primarily in the concepts of sovereignty, prohibition of privateering and prosecution of piracy, and restrictions on the activities of naval forces in certain areas. The unregulated nature of a number of aspects of supranational naval activities, notably the right of entry to foreign ports, the procedure for stopping and inspecting foreign merchant ships at sea, and the limits of the powers of foreign coastal authorities over a warship, has led to an active search for appropriate acceptable international customs and attempts to substantiate them with legal doctrine based on national statutes and the established practice of maritime states. The development of the relevant legislation is still in progress and is far from being completed, given the challenges of Ukrainian naval doctrine and the level of implementation and incorporation of international and foreign experience. In this regard, the naval policy in its internal and external dimensions is of particular importance, which is regulated both by national acts of an administrative and legal nature and by international legal sources of various origins.