Sources of right to freedom of peaceful assembly
Authors: Sambor М. А. 
Published: April 2020

The right to freedom of peaceful assembly is marked by the multifaceted nature of this right for society, the state, groups of individuals and individuals. The right to freedom of peaceful assembly is a manifestation of human nature in communication with other people, society and the state. The unconditional right to freedom of peaceful assembly has a rich history of its formation and development. However, without historical origins it is impossible to form an objective and necessary for the modern man to understand the content of the right to freedom of peaceful assembly.

Based on the above, the purpose of this article is to investigate the sources of the right to freedom of peaceful assembly.

For the first time in modern domestic science the sources of the right to freedom of peaceful assembly have been explored. In order to understand and form the legal basis and mechanism (algorithm) for exercising the right to freedom of peaceful assembly, it is important to understand the origins of this right and to substantially fill the right to freedom of peaceful assembly. Sources of the right to freedom of peaceful assembly in their retrospective dimension allow us to approach the understanding of the right to freedom of peaceful assembly, taking into account the historical peculiarities of the understanding of this right, conditioned by the historical stages of the development of humanity, statehood and legal ideas about human rights in general and the right to freedom of peaceful assembly in particular.

Sources of law are not only formalized and materialized rules of law, but also the engine, the driving force in the identification, formulation and only in the further implementation of the rule of law in a certain materialized regulatory document. This aspect of the sources of law cannot be neglected, since in this case the sources of law, including the sources of the right to freedom of peaceful assembly, are significantly depleted, and a number of links in the chain of law are lost. Therefore, the nature of the origin of the right to freedom of peaceful assembly, which is identified with human nature, is important for the study of the sources of the right to peaceful assembly, and therefore the right to freedom of peaceful assembly is a natural human right that determines its social activity and role in society. In this regard, interest is defined as a natural legal source of the right to freedom of peaceful assembly. Interest is realized in the form of the right to freedom of peaceful assembly, so it reveals the meaning of this right.

The source of the right to freedom of peaceful assembly is an integral part of the sources of law as a whole, and therefore the study of the former is inseparable from an understanding of the sources of law. Common formal (material) sources of law are regulations, customs, legal treaties, legal precedents, and legal doctrines, so within the scope of this article, we carefully examine these sources of the right to freedom of peaceful assembly.

The natural-law component of the right to freedom of peaceful assembly emphasizes the direct dependence of the existence and enjoyment of the right on human rights and its interest in the exercise of this right, so we are convinced that the said source of the right to freedom of peaceful assembly is likely to be on the frontier of the study of legal and other social sciences. Formal legal sources of the right to freedom of peaceful assembly, in their turn, are generally in the sphere of sources of law, with those peculiarities that dictate an understanding of the content and peculiarities of the exercise and realization of the right to freedom of peaceful assembly. By far, the most widespread source of the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and with didactic features of knowing this right in the system of Ukrainian law is a legal act. The Constitution of Ukraine belongs to this type of sources of the right to freedom of peaceful assembly (as its special norms intended to regulate public relations in the exercise of the right to freedom of peaceful assembly in Ukrainian society, as well as general rules that ensure the ordering of relations and the formation of legal space for the implementation of the said rights), the Civil Code of Ukraine, the Code of Administrative Judiciary of Ukraine, as well as other procedural normative legal acts, which, although they do not contain any special rules, are directed to regulate relations precisely with the exercise of the right to freedom of peaceful assembly, but in their general form provide the opportunity to regulate a number of aspects of the exercise of the right to freedom of peaceful assembly. Another, possibly key, source of the right to freedom of peaceful assembly is a legal treaty, in particular an international legal treaty. It is in such treaties that the world community, humanity, has recognized the right of each person to the right to freedom of peaceful assembly, to freedom of exercise and to the exclusivity of grounds for restricting the exercise of the right to freedom of peaceful assembly. Unfortunately, legal precedent in Ukraine only becomes meaningful, and as a source of the right to freedom of peaceful assembly it is characterized, in some places, by contradictory content.