MODERN METHODOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO THE INVESTIGATION OF ENSURING AND PROTECTION OF HUMAN RIGHT TO ACCESS TO PUBLIC INFORMATION

Abstract

The purpose of the paper is to study the preconditions of the necessity to use new scientific tools during the study of issues related to the ensuring and protection of human right to access to public information; to characterize the main scientific approaches to modern researches in the sphere of safeguarding human right to access to public information; to identify promising directions for further research on this topic. Methodology. The paper presents the examples of a negative use of scientific methodology in conducting research in the area of administrative law and procedure and also draws attention to the need to reconsider an obsolete scientific methodology that does not correspond to the current realities and negatively affects the development of legal science. It indicates and characterizes the main preconditions of the necessity to use new scientific tools while investigating the issues related to ensuring and protection of human right to access to public information. In the context of the research of peculiarities of administrative and legal coverage and protection of human right to access to public information, it is proposed to use the systems approach, which is extremely effective in analysing complicated legal phenomena and processes and permits to study the peculiarities of substantive, procedure and procedural legal regulation as a cohesive whole. Practical implications. The system approach is an extremely promising technique for studying legal reality. Its use allows synthesizing all the knowledge about legal phenomena (legal rules, legal relations, legal consciousness, etc.), which is accumulated during the past stages of formation and development of domestic legal science, for a deeper insight into the development and functioning of law in general and administrative law in particular. Value/originality. Problems that exist in legal science in general and in the science of administrative law, in particular, can be solved only with the help of new scientific tools, specifically, by applying the system approach. The use of the systems approach in case of studying the issues of ensuring and protection of the human right to access to public information would allow combining all studies that were performed on this issue in substantive, procedure or procedural parts of the administrative law.

Keywords

• administrative law and procedure
• methodology
• public information
• right to access to public information
• administrative legal proceedings