The Dialectical Nature of Legal Responsibility for the Violation of Legislation on the Prevention of the Emergence and Spread of Particularly Dangerous Infectious Diseases

Abstract

Legislation regulating public health relations in the direction of preventing the emergence and spread of infectious diseases, including those that are particularly dangerous, is analysed. The meaning of «system» is clarified. It is established that legal liability has the characteristics and properties of the system. With the help of a systematic approach, the relevance of the interaction of different types of responsibilities is substantiated. Attention is drawn to the tendency to expand the range of social relations governed by the rule of law, borrowing the rules of international law, the formation of complex branches of law. As a result, traditional sectoral types of legal liability are endowed with signs of intersectoral nature. It is proved that the responsibility for violating the legislation on prevention and spread of particularly dangerous infectious diseases is also endowed with signs of intersectoral, as its specific object is to protect public health from the emergence and spread of particularly dangerous infectious diseases and its provision is supported by the presence of different types of liability and types of offenses, which together form a single, holistic system of such liability. The criterion for distinguishing such a system has become the object of an offense. The close interdisciplinary connection between administrative and criminal responsibility is emphasized. Positive and negative approaches to the understanding of administrative and criminal liability in general, as well as in the field of occurrence and spread of particularly dangerous infectious diseases are researched. Emphasis is placed on the need to distinguish between the concepts of «responsibility» and «punishment». Arguments in favour of a broad approach to the interpretation of legal liability in general and to liability in this area are presented. Emphasis is placed on the need to rethink the dialectical connection between law and coercion, namely the need to understand responsibility not only as a control mechanism by the state, but also as a form of self-control of an individual, which later becomes his stable inner conviction.