| Abstract [eng] |
Summary When Lithuania joined the European Union on 1 May 2004, the law of European Communities became an integral part of law of the Republic of Lithuania. While the system of criminal law sources is expanding, whereby one legal norm complements or replaces another or there is a competition between them, objective and subjective reasons which cause the occurrence of potential judicial errors tend to arise. In this respect, the official doctrines of the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Lithuania and the formation of uniform judicial practice of the Supreme Court of the Republic of Lithuania become increasingly important. The aim of the present thesis is to review in principle the established system of criminal law sources in a systematic manner by expanding it with new forms of kinds of legal sources, presenting the concept of the EU acquis and certain peculiarities of co-operation between courts and the police in the European Union, inter alia the paper reveals: 1) the semantic importance of the use of legal terminology and criteria for distinguishing sources of legal norms and sources of legal thought; 2) specifics of criminal law sources of the Republic of Lithuania and ideas reflected in them during various stages of the evolution of the state and legal sources and priorities of changed protected legal values in the new Criminal Code of the Rpulic of Lithuania; 3) subornation and correlation of standard sources of criminal law; 4) the content of different forms of criminal law sources and relationship with others sources, examples of judicial practice, potential problems and their solutions, the significance of alternative legal sources and their relation to criminal law through the logical structure of criminal law norm as well as examples when sources of other branches of law become ad hoc and criminal law sources; 5) concrete examples aimed at proving the application of generally accepted principles in criminal law and their constitutionalised recognition as Lithuanian criminal law sources; 6) the issue of independence of courts, the significance of recognition of court judgements and official doctrine as criminal law sources in the context of enforcing justice by emphasising the growing importance of the Constitutional Court in the negative and positive legislation process; 7) attention is paid to active participation of criminal law scholars by amending, supplementing or repealing norms of criminal law sources in the processes of criminalisation and decriminalisation, penalisation and depenalisation in order to avoid chaotic criminal law source replacement procedures initiated by the legislator. The conclusions formulated at the end of this thesis reflect the key aspects of results achieved during this study. |
