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Audrius Bakaveckas

Abstract

The systematic and logical analysis of provisions of the Article 5 Part l Section X of the Constitution as well as the Law on Local Self-Government and the European Charter on Self-Government allows to state that selfgoverning institutions are not state authorities, although their administrative structures and civil servants engaged in them perform functions of executive and managing character. The constitutional principles used as the basis of organizing state authorities and for organizing local self-governing institutions coincide only partially. In the organizing process of self-governing institutions, as distinct from state authorities, the principe of distribution of powers is not applied.
The legal norms on regulation local self-government lack a stability. The legal norm on the procedure of organizing and functioning of local self-governing institutions, i.e. the Law on Local Self-Government, had been altered for 53 times within 14 years of Independence. The most number of alterations of the said norm (10) took place in the year 2001. Even the legal norm providing a regulation of the key principles of self-government, i.e. the Constitution, had not avoided alterations. Its Article 119 Part 2 had been amended twice – in 1996 and 2002.
Within the above-mentioned period, self-governing institutions suffered three essential reforms: on 12 February 1990; on 7 July 1994; and on 28 January 2003.
One of the most important problems of extension of the legal base of local self-government is a political aspect that results supporting or non-supporting of certain initiatives of self-governing institutions by politicians. Their extension is also hampered by inactivity of central authorities that avoid to initiate projects of legal norms and to settle in such a way the problems that hamper the activities of self-governing institutions. Financing of implementation of the passed legal norms and the programme of the Government are important for an extension of the legal base of self-government as well, because the measures of implementation of the programme of the Government, developed on its base, are not always executed.

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Section
Articles