PRINCIPLE OF NATURAL COURT: CURRENT PROBLEMS OF LEGAL UNDERSTANDING AND LAW ENFORCEMENT IN UKRAINE
Authors:   Taras Shevchenko national University of Kyiv, Prylutskyi S. 
Published: December 2021

In 2016, a provision appeared in Article 125 of the Basic Law, which stipulated that higher specialized courts may operate in accordance with the law. Filling the content of this wording in, Article 31 of the Law "On the Judiciary and the Status of Judges" (2016) establishes that in the judicial system there are higher specialized courts as courts of first instance to consider certain categories of cases. This category of courts today includes the High Court of Intellectual Property and the High Anti-Corruption Court, activities of which are initiated by the relevant legislation. However, in political circles there was a discussion about the constitutionality of this court and, accordingly, the subject of the right to a constitutional petition questioned a number of provisions of the Law "On the Supreme Anti-Corruption Court" and appealed to the Constitutional Court of Ukraine to declare this law unconstitutional. In turn, the Constitutional Court of Ukraine initiated constitutional proceedings on this issue. Familiarization with the legal position of the subject of the constitutional petition indicates that the key issue of this constitutional proceeding concerns the presence of signs of a "special court" (within the meaning of Part 6 of Article 125 of the Constitution of Ukraine) in the mechanism of legislative regulation of the Supreme Anti-Corruption Court. In order to find an objective answer to the existing conflict, it is necessary to abstractly identify the main features of a "special" court. To solve such an applied problem, the author of the article turned to the theory and applied provisions of the principle of natural judgment, which was the subject of this study. As a result of the study, the author argues that by giving the Supreme Anti-Corruption Court exclusive jurisdiction over the system of general courts, the legislator has significantly deviated from the permissible limits of constitutional legality. The author singled out and grouped the key features of a special court, which included: 1) Separation of a judicial institution with a separate system of instances for consideration of certain categories of cases selected from the general array (special jurisdiction) or in respect to a separate category of persons. 2) The court, which is entrusted with special, different from other general courts, the purpose and objectives of the activity. 3) A court formed to expedite the resolution of certain categories of cases specific to a certain period; 4) A court in which judges have a special legal status (special tasks in the administration of justice; special professional qualifications (requirements, selection criteria); a special (extraordinary) procedure for the formation of the judiciary, etc. It is seen that the principle of natural judgment – is a fundamental constitutional and legal heritage of civilized humanity, which is designed to protect people, their rights and freedoms from the arbitrariness of the state, and from the use of courts as an instrument of terror and wrongful persecution.