General and special principles of criminal law and their correlation

The importance of the question of the criminal law principles increases in the social and crisis situations when there is need in the judicial and legal reform and the change of the fundamentals of the criminal policy. For the conceptual justification of the new criminal law acts it is important not only to understand the general legal principles for the purposes of the criminal law regulation but also the special principles of codification of the criminal law norms and law enforcement. It explains the choice of the research purpose in this article: the creation of the essential and substantial characteristics of the general and special principles of criminal law, and their correlation. In the article there have been discussed the questions of classification of the criminal law principles taking into account their purpose in the mechanism of the criminal law regulation; the correlation of the general and special principles of criminal law; as well as the question of the codification principles of the criminal law rules which are underinvestigated in the legal literature. Conclusions: the general principles of criminal law express the fundamental ideas of criminal liability. They provide the interaction of all the links of the mechanism of the criminal law regulation and, along with the subject and method of regulation, cause the combining of norms of criminal law into the criminal law branch. The special principles define the specific content of separate segments of the mechanism of the criminal law regulation. These are the principles of lawmaking (the principles of codification of the criminal law norms) and the principles of law enforcement (the principles of classification of crimes and the principles of assigning punishment and determining other penal consequences of a crime). The principles of codification of the criminal law norms have only a direct bearing on one segment of the regulation mechanism - a source of law. They determine how to enshrine the norms of criminal law in the legislation. These are the principles of democracy, social dependence, the system enshrinement of the criminal law norms in the Criminal Code, the compliance of criminal law with the constitutional legislation and international law.