1566 metų Antrasis Lietuvos Statutas Lietuvos konstitucionalizmo tradicijos kontekste

ENOne of the purposes of this article is to show that the 16th century Lithuanian Statutes (1529, 1566 and 1588), as the first biggest codifications of Lithuanian legal system, might be treated not only from the perspective of Lithuanian legal history, but also from the Lithuanian constitutional law’s point of view. The author here argues that the 1566 edition of the Statute or the so-called “Second Lithuanian Statute” (1566) is the most important edition for the Lithuanian constitutional tradition, because the first edition (1529) was not as much developed, and the last one or the “Third Lithuanian Statute” (1588) was adopted already after Lithuania’s Union with Poland in 1569 and reflected some new political reality. The author here analyzes (in the text of the 1566 Lithuanian Statute) all three elements of modern constitutionalism: the rule of law (consisting of the supremacy clause and the separation of powers), democracy (consisting of the sovereignty of people, the institute of elections and parliamentarism) and human rights (including personal, civil and political rights). Regarding the rule of law – it is argued that the Lithuanian Statues of the 16th century are legal acts of constitutional status and they include a certain degree of the separation of powers, especially by providing a high degree of judicial independence.Democracy, first of all, is represented here by the concept of a republic (Pечъ посполитaя) as the commonwealth of the whole civic society with a commonly elected parliament. The democratic principle is here reflected in the idea of a civic nation (although including only nobility), which starts to compete with the sovereignty of a monarch; second – democracy is revealed through the right of a civil nation to be represented in the parliament (Seimas), and finally – democracy is presented in the Statute through the foundation of the traditional elements of parliamentarism: the special status of parliament and its members, legislation powers of parliament and, to some degree of scrutiny, of executive power. The human rights concept, in the text of the Statute, is developed not as much as democracy, but it is also significant, because it includes such modern human rights as habeas corpus, the right to counsel, electoral rights and others. The article ends with some conclusions that the 1566 Second Lithuanian Statute should be included into sequence of the so-called Lithuanian historic constitution, consisting of 1385 (Middle Ages), 1566 (Renaissance), 1791 (Enlightenment), 1918 (Modernity), 1992 (Postmodernism). [From the publication]