RELATIONSHIP OF JUDGES’ DISMISSAL WITH RELATED LEGAL CATEGORIES

Abstract

The article is devoted to clarifying the essence and boundaries of the concept of “removal of a judge” by correlating it with related legal categories, namely “removal from office”, “temporary suspension of a judge from administering justice”, “suspension of the powers of a judge”, “termination of the powers of a judge”, “dismissal of a judge”, “suspension from work”, and “removal of a civil servant from performing official duties”. Based on a systematic analysis of the provisions of the Code of Criminal Procedure of Ukraine and the legislation on the judiciary, as well as doctrinal approaches, it was established that there is a lack of normative definitions of key categories, which leads to the risk of their erroneous identification in law enforcement. It is substantiated that “removal from office” and “temporary suspension of a judge from administering justice” have a common procedural nature as measures to ensure criminal proceedings, but are not identical. It is proposed to interpret “suspension of the powers of a judge” as a broader generic category that covers various temporary states of non-administration of justice, while “removal of a judge” is its separate case, due to various behavioral and procedural grounds. It is proved that removal cannot be considered as a type of termination of powers or dismissal, since it does not terminate service-labor relations, but temporarily blocks their element related to the performance of the function of justice. It is concluded that “judge suspension” is a separate specific concept that is significantly different from such categories as “termination of the powers of a judge”, “dismissal of a judge”, “dismissal of a civil servant from performing official duties”, does not overlap with them and only partially coincides with the concepts of “suspension from work”, “dismissal from position”, but is not identical to them and is related as a part and a whole to the concept of “suspension of the powers of a judge”. In general, the common features of all these concepts with the concept of “judge suspension” are that: their emergence is always a reaction to the negative actions of an employee; in essence, they represent the prevention of an employee from performing his labor function; their application does not depend on the expression of the will of the person.