ACCESS TO CIVIL SERVICE IN UKRAINE AND EUROPE: FROM PRIVILEGE TO FUNDAMENTAL CONSTITUTIONAL LAW

Abstract

The article explores access to the civil service from the time of Antiquity to the present. The focus is on the causes, grounds and ideology of the transformation of the civil service from the privilege granted to the aristocracy (nobles) who were “servants of the king” to the constitutional right of equal access to the civil service on the basis of democracy, integrity and professionalism. It is argued that the Declaration of Human and Citizen Rights, adopted in 1879 by the National Assembly of France, in Article VI enshrined public service not as a privilege previously granted, but from the seventeenth century. –and was sold by kings, and as an important right of a citizen of the following content: “All citizens, by virtue of their equality before the law, are given equal access to all public offices, places and services in accordance with their abilities and without any other differences, except as stipulated by them. virtues and abilities”. The right to equal access to public service was asserted in the 17th-19th centuries. its distinctive but democratic development also in Switzerland and the USA. It is emphasized that during the stay of the Ukrainian Lands in XVIII –at the beginning. XX century. within the Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman empires, the issue of joining the civil service was governed by numerous legal acts that governed, in essence, the corporate relations of the then bureaucracy. However, if in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, after the constitutional reform of the second sex. XIX century. the right of citizens to civil service was enshrined in the “Constitutional Law on the General Rights of the Citizens, for the Kingdoms and Areas represented in Reischrat” in 1867, then in the Russian Empire, beginning with the Table of Ranks (1722) of Peter I and the collapse of the regime of Nicholas II in 1917, in the absence of a constitution, the order of entry and passage of public service was standardized in the Civil Service Statutes and Annexes thereto. These statutes normalized the access of the civil service (by definition of government and the elective), which were discriminatory and consolidated the ineffective aristocratic bureaucracy. The establishment of civil service in the time of the Ukrainian state Hetman Pavel Skoropadsky in 1918 was an important but not a long step. After the Bolshevik expansion and the incorporation of Ukraine into the former USSR, a staff corps, which was under the control of the party-repressive state regime, operated for a long time in Ukraine. And only two years after Ukraine gained independence, the right of equal access to the civil service was enshrined in a special Law of Ukraine “On Civil Service”, and later in Art. 38 of the Constitution of Ukraine. This brought Ukraine back into the context of the pan-European genesis of the civil service, as an important form of realization by citizens of their desire to professionally ensure the realization of the fundamental functions of the state.