Improvement of Legal Regulation of Public Discussion on the Draft

Abstract

The institute of public discussion of legal act draft as a way of interaction between society and state, a form of direct participation of citizens in public administration is important for ensuring the effectiveness of law-making. High-profile public discussions that have taken place recently, as well as the adoption of some normative legal acts without prior public discussion, which caused a negative reaction from the public, scientific and business community, demonstrate the need for further study of the institute of public discussion of draft which contributes to establish a dialogue between civil society and state, to raise the level of public level of confidence in public authorities and local self-government. The purpose of article is the doctrinal justification of the ways to improving legal regulation of public discussion on draft. Using formal legal, historical, systematic methods of research, as well as the method of modeling, the authors come to the following conclusions and proposals: on overcoming terminological uncertainty of the current legislative and sublegislative regulation concerning public discussion and public expertise; on including regulations on public discussion of the draft normative legal act in the Federal law, it is more preferable — in the Federal law «On normative legal acts» and in the Federal law «On public discussion of drafting» (more detailed special regulation) taking into account the available positive experience of subordinate entities of federation; on expanding the scope of application of public discussion and the circle of initiators of public discussion; on establishing an obligatory character of public discussions of the draft of the Federal Constitutional law and Federal law; about the inclusion of the most significant projects of normative legal acts in special sections to the Internet portal «regulation.gov.ru» to facilitate their searching; on the mandatory drafting of current and future plans of lawmaking activity of the authorities alongside with their publication for public information (except for plans of drafting of documents constituting a state secret, etc.), which, among other measures will help to solve the problem of the insufficient popularity of public discussion procedures. It is concluded that public discussion should become an obligatory element of the law-making process.