The Legal Nature of Public Service Disputes concerning the Legality of Imposition of Disciplinary Sanctions

The paper examines the concept of a public service dispute as a type of a legal conflict, as a protective legal relationship and a juridical procedural activity. The author analyzes the modern terminology of a public service dispute enshrined in the legislation regulating public service, identifies the shortcomings of legal definitions. The author establishes and describes the mechanisms for the consideration of public service disputes provided for by the legislation.

The main approaches to the definition of a public service dispute are analyzed. The author has highlighted its features as a complex protective legal relationship. The author shows the erroneous identification by some researchers of labor and public service relations and approaches to their determination of the legal nature of public service disputes, including the legality of the application of disciplinary sanctions. It has been substantiated that the legal nature of public service disputes in the civil service system is primarily determined by the content of the relations that underlie their occurrence—public service legal relations—and not by the forms of their consideration, which allows the possibility of applying labor and civil procedural legislation to disputed legal relations.

The author defines a public service dispute and an official conflict, describes the signs of a public service dispute on the legality of the imposition of a disciplinary sanction, qualifies the subject matter of the dispute under consideration—substantive legal requirements (disagreements) of the parties that act as an element of the connection between the substantive legal relationship between the parties to the dispute and the procedure applied for the dispute consideration. It has been substantiated that the public service dispute consideration concerning the legality of imposing a disciplinary sanction, termination of a public service contract constitutes a type of law enforcement procedural activity that has its own basis, subject matter, goals, elements, procedural forms and stages, types of decisions, which makes it possible to single out such disputes as one of the administrative proceedings included in the administrative process structure.

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