Almanac of law. Issue 15 (2024), pages 391–398.

DOI: 10.33663/2524-017X-2024-15-391-398

Petrenko A.
Sources of law of the European Union: concepts and specifics

The article is devoted to the study of the peculiarities of the sources of law of the European Union. It is emphasized that the quantitative and qualitative specificity of the sources of law in the European Union is determined by the uniqueness of its legal system, which determines the diversity of their classification, hierarchy and application at the national and supranational levels.

It is noted that the most widespread in modern scientific literature is the dichotomous division of the law of the European Union into primary and secondary, in connection with which the sources of «primary» and «secondary» EU law are distinguished. At the same time, the primary law of the EU includes, first of all, the fundamental, defining principles and norms for the European Union, enshrined in the founding treaties of the EU, the EU Charter of Rights, as well as international treaties concluded both by the European Union and the EU member states, and secondary law of the European Union includes norms issued by EU institutions in the form of regulations, directives, resolutions, etc., and which must correspond to the sources of primary law.

The basis of the sources of law of the European Union is the common interest of the European peoples, their common valuable assets, which are laid at the basis of their progressive development. This feature refers primarily to the EU Constituent Treaties as international legal acts, which directly express the will and interests of all the states participating in them. At the same time, it also finds its indirect manifestation in the relevant legal acts of supranational EU institutions (European Parliament, European Commission, Council of the EU, etc.), which by their legal nature rather have a regional character, because they are not international and national legal acts in the classical meaning. At the same time, the legal acts of such institutions of the European Union, by their legal characteristics, are designed to ensure a stable relationship between the norms of its Constituent Treaties and legal acts of the EU member states and, in this way, the relationship of the supranational legal system of the European Union as an integration association of European states with the national legal systems that are part of it.

As a result of research the following conclusions are made:

1. The system of sources of law formed in the European Union is directly interconnected with the features of the legal system of the EU as an integration association of sovereign states, characterized by the presence of supranational power institutions common to them, authorized to adopt regulatory and legal acts that are binding on the entire territory of the EU. The dual nature of the legal system of the European Union, which combines international legal and national contexts, determines the specificity of the hierarchical structure of the sources of EU law, the highest level of which belongs to the EU Constituent Treaties, primarily the Treaty on the European Union and the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. At the same time, the hierarchy of sources of EU law is most clearly manifested at the level of legal acts of primary and secondary EU law, as well as legal acts of the authorities of EU member states, which must comply with the mandatory norms of primary and secondary EU law.

2. The specificity of the sources of the law of the European Union is manifested primarily in the special nature of their spatial and subject action, the differentiated order of their adoption, putting them into effect, implementation of its norms into the national legal systems of the EU member states, in the combination of precedents and normativelegal foundations in the legal regulation of social relations, as well as in the common axiological basis of the legal development of the EU member states, the content of which is embodied within the entire system of sources of law of the European Union.

Key words: sources of law, the European Union, sources of primary law, sources of secondary law, judicial precedents, founding treaties.

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Anatoliy Anatoliyovych Petrenko,
PhD student of the Department of Theory of State and Law
of the V. M. Koretsky Institute of State and Law of the NAS of Ukraine,
Doctor of Philosophy
in the field of international law
ORCID: 0000-0002-1646-6652