City charters in Ukraine

In Ukraine, both municipal reform and the reform of decentralization of public power are underway. Both of themconcern issues of local self-government in cities. Both of them are related to the further improvement of the normativeregulation of such self-government. At the local level, the main document on the basis of which it is carried out isthe charter of the territorial community. Despite their importance for science and practice, the statutes of territorialcommunities of cities remain poorly studied in the Ukrainian legal literature.The author of the article has been actively researching the issues of the statutes of territorial communities inUkraine in general and the statutes of territorial communities of cities in particular for more than five years. Thearticle presents the author's work, conclusions and generalizations on this issue.Thus, the author offers his own definition of the term “statute of the territorial community of the city” and drawsattention to the fact that so far this concept has not been defined in the Ukrainian legal literature. The author provides abrief overview of the works of authors that will be useful to researchers on this issue – some scholars have devoted theirwork to the statutes of territorial communities in general, some – exclusively to the statutory law of cities. The authorsuggests to pay attention to the fact that it is necessary to refuse to call the statutes of territorial communities “localconstitutions”. Based on a study of the statutes of Berdyansk, Vinnytsia, Zhytomyr, Zaporizhia, Ivano-Frankivsk,Kirovohrad, Kyiv, Odessa, Ternopil, Kharkiv, Cherkasy, and others, the author formulates a conclusion about theinexpediency of such an approach. Doctrinal arguments are also put forward in his favor.The author pays considerable attention to highlighting the features of the statutes of territorial communitiesand thoroughly characterizes each of them (including such as special legal techniques and thesaurus, special order ofdevelopment and adoption, stability, ability to act as the foundation of rule-making).