Legality And Legal Certainty In Criminal Law: The Issues Of Differentiation

In this article, the author addresses the issue on the differentiation of legality and legal certainty principles in the field of criminal law. Review of the main scientific positions, decisions of the European Court of Human Rights on the application of Article 7 European Convention on Human Rights, as well as decisions of the Constitutional Court of Ukraine on the constitutionality of several articles of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, allows us to conclude the debatability of this issue. Despite the positions of several scholars and decisions of the Constitutional Court of Ukraine, the main thesis is that legality and legal certainty do not set a similar scope of requirements in the field of criminal law. The legal certainty requirement to the content of law and its application are more general than the requirements established by the principle of legality. But the legality principle as a part of the general legal principle of legal certainty sets up more specific provisions to the process of creation, adoption, and application especially criminal statutes than the previous one. To this conclusion the author came after a retrospective analysis of the philosophical and historical grounds for these principles.