Vol 21, No 4 (2017)

The principle of proportionality is one of the fundamental legal principles defining the limits of state authority. The principle of proportionality, among other things, is the basis of legal responsibility and ensures the justice of the punishment being imposed. The roots of the requirement of proportionali-ty of punishment to the committed offense goes to the early history of mankind, the first institutions for responding to crimes - blood feud and talion - were based on the idea of proportionality. The univer-sality of these institutions in the history of mankind also attests to the universality of the principle of proportionality. Gradually, in the process of developing social relations, a transition was made from di-rect physical punishment, which was supposed to be blood vengeance and talion, to material compensa-tion for damage. At the same time, modern approaches to determining the proportionality of punishment for an offense arose. Today, the principle of proportionality underlies the legislative regulation and practical imple-mentation of legal responsibility in all democratic countries. It is actively applied in the practice of na-tional and international courts for the protection of human rights. The principle of proportionality re-quires that a balance of competing interests be found when establishing the sanction, and not only how the sanctioning measures will help protect public and private interests, but also what impact they will have on the person who violated the law. The principle of proportionality presupposes the duty of the legislator to provide in the normative legal acts such sanctions that ensure the proportionality of the act and punishment, and the duty of the courts to exercise their proper application. The analysis of the leg-islation and jurisprudence of Russia, the United States, Canada and Germany makes it possible to iden-tify some of the generally accepted methods of legislative regulation of sanctions (qualified offenses, differentiated sanctions, the possibility of imposing punishment below the lowest limit), ensuring the implementation of the requirement of proportionality, as well as judicial verification of proportionality of legislative sanctions and enforcement decisions (proportionality test).

The Article is devoted to justification of the fact that the federalism has a number of features, which are common with the characteristics of liberal democracy. The author proves that both of these phenomena represent the political forms of the organization of society developed by the Western Euro-pean and North American political and legal cultures. The interrelation between federalism and democ-racy is traced in the western legal and political cultures at the conceptual, structural and functional lev-els, these phenomena are caused by typological specifics of the western societies. That means that the diffusion of the public power, competition of social groups, development of institutes of civil society are internally immanent to western political and legal cultures. The integrating elements of federalism are provided with its consideration in three main aspects - as the structurally functional principle characterizing society and the public power, as the way of the political and territorial organization of the state assuming a combination of elements of centralization and decentralization and as a process, characterizing society in aspect of its democratization. Representatives of the American and European political and legal science of the second half of the 20 century came to a conclusion that formation of the democratic state and realization of the princi-ples of federalism are impossible in societies where ideological opposition, lack of uniform political and legal culture, differentiation of society on religious, ethnic, social and to other principles takes place. In their aspiration to solve a problem of theoretical justification of a possibility of implementation of the principles of liberal democracy and federalism in any society, in any cultural and historical condi-tions, the ideologists of liberal democracy go for modification of their concepts. As an example the idea of consociation democracy is considered as some kind of «social dimension of federalism». However, despite such attempts, it is necessary to recognize that in the societies where the political power was in-stitutionalized in others, than in Europe and North America, historical conditions, where in a basis of relationship between the individual, societies and the state lie other principles, where liberalism and lib-eral democracy as concepts weren't a product of the society, and have been introduced from the outside, the principles of federalism in their western, liberal and democratic understanding are inapplicable because of lack of objective social, economic, political, ideological and cultural prerequisites to their real-ization.

The problems of regulating the invalidity of contract under the Italian law is dictated by the crisis of the pandect system of the division of irregular contracts into nullity and annullability. In particular, in the Italian doctrine and case-law attempted to add within the pandect system of invalidity of bargains supplement it with new types of irregular contracts, borrowed from the French civil law tradition. The author using comparative method and examines the invalidity of contract under the Italian law. Firstly, the Article deals with the influence of German and French legal regulation of invalidity of contracts on Italian Law. Secondly, the author discusses the difference between nullity (nullità) and annullability (an-nullabilità) of contracts and analyzes the basic concepts of contract law such as causa as the essential term of contract, for the most part, determines the organization of norms on the nullity of the treaty in Italian civil law. Also the Article focus on the public order, imperative norms under Italian contract law. In conclusion of the Article presents general conclusions on the regulation of nullity and annulla-bility under Italian contract law, as well as an overview of convalidation and conversion. The article is oriented to civilists interested in the comparative legal research and the Italian contract law.

The 2017 Annual Conference of the Association of Human Rights Institutes (AHRI) held at the University of Leuven (KU Leuven) in Leuven (Belgium) from 27 to 28 April 2017 is the one of the leading events among the professional associations uniting international law scholars in human rights field. The conference focused on issues of monitoring compliance with international human rights obli-gations of States in the activities of universal and regional human rights bodies, particularly UN human rights mechanisms, human rights treaty bodies and regional and sub-regional human rights mechanisms within European, Inter-American and African human rights systems. Within these issues a particular at-tention was paid to the interaction between universal and regional human rights systems, specifically the role of regional mechanisms in the promotion and protection of human rights and enhancing univer-sal human rights standards enshrined in international human rights treaties. The paper provides a brief review of the selected reports presented at the conference, which raised a particular scientific interest of the author. The author describes the reports devoted to: 1) factors de-termining adoption and enforcement of international human rights obligations by States; 2) States’ im-plementation of international human rights norms through the lens of interplay between the internation-al, regional and national levels; 3) the interaction between the universal and European human rights sys-tems (European Court of Human Rights with human rights treaty bodies and special procedures of the UN Human Rights Council).