Thesis supervisor: Professor Kalle Merusk
Opponents: Professor Friedrich Schoch (University of Freiburg) and UT Visiting Professor Uno Lõhmus
Summary
Order Protection Act came into force on 1 July 2014, which led to the completion of the reform of Estonian order protection law. One of the central features of this legal act is the division between danger aversion law, which applies to specific and clear hazards that have already occurred and danger prevention law, which must ensure the protection of society against danger potentials, which are possible, but have not yet obtained a form of concrete danger.
In this work author set the task of developing a closer look on the reasons of the emerging of danger prevention law, its legal dogmatics and the constitutional bases.
An analyse of this legal area is especially important, as modern societies facing scientific and criminal risks hitherto unknown, tend to use ever more danger prevention measures in early phases of potentially hazardous situations.
As a result of the analyse it can be concluded that, despite of the wish to create a common legal bases for Estonian law enforcement law in Order Protection Act, the danger prevention law is still quite fragmented and vaguely definable set of legal norms. At least four sub-areas of danger prevention law can be distinquished, which differ significantly from each other in many aspects.
From the constitutional aspect the major difficulty is the high level of abstraction of danger prevention norms and the resulting broad discretion of the implementing administrative bodies. Danger prevention compared to the danger aversion expands the circle of persons whos basic rights could be subject to limitations and at the same time reduces the possibility that a person can avoid the limitation by his or her law-abiding conduct. Although danger prevention is necessary to some extent in order to maintain public order in modern society, the objective tendency to increase in such measures is problematic from the rule of law point of view and needs precaution.