Kai kurie vyriausybės aktų konstitucingumo kontrolės klausimai

Abstract

The Constitution uses various terms to describe legal acts adopted by the Government: a resolution, a decision of the Government, as well as the term “act of the Government”. The constitutional doctrine, which reveals the content of those different terms and their interrelationships, has changed. The changes in the doctrine were determined by the fact that, on 13 July 2013, the Constitution was supplemented with the Constitutional Act on Membership of the Republic of Lithuania in the European Union. The previous doctrine was modified in the sense that the decisions of the Government that it adopts in expressing the position of the Republic of Lithuania on proposals for the adoption of legal acts of the European Union are not a general concept, but a type of legal acts adopted by the Government. The official constitutional doctrine formulated by the Constitutional Court at the beginning of its activity – according to which, under Article 105 of the Constitution, the Constitutional Court had the power to investigate only the constitutionality of effective laws and other effective legal acts, and thus only the acts of the Government in force – was constitutionally unfounded. Such an interpretation of Article 105 of the Constitution was incompatible with other articles of the Constitution, inter alia, with Paragraph 1 of Article 30 of the Constitution, according to which “A person whose constitutional rights or freedoms are violated shall have the right to apply to a court”, as well as Paragraph 2 of Article 110 of the Constitution, according to which “In cases when there are grounds to believe that a law or another legal act that should be applied in a concrete case is in conflict with the Constitution, the judge shall suspend the consideration of the case and shall apply to the Constitutional Court, requesting that it decide whether the law or another legal act in question is in compliance with the Constitution”.