HISTORY OF CRIMINAL LEGISLATION DEVELOPMENT IN SLOVAKIA
The subject of this research is criminal legislation of the Slovak Republic since the merge of Slovakia in the AustroHungarian Empire (XIX century) to the present day. The article analyzes the emergency criminal legislation of the World War II period, the socialist Criminal Codes of the Czechoslovak Republic (1950, 1961) and the existing Criminal Code of the Slovak Republic of 2005. The article also touches upon the country’s constitutional development on the example of the adopted Constitutions of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (1948, 1960) and the Constitution of the Slovak Republic (1992). The author pays special attention to the integration of Slovakia into the European legal framework when it became a member of the European Union in 2004. The article also contains comparative analysis of the main institutions of the criminal law in Russia and Slovakia. During the research the author used the following special methods: historical, logical, and comparative law method, which includes a variety of techniques (doctrinal, regulatory, functional comparison). As opposed to the criminal law of other European Union countries, the Slovak criminal law has remained practically unexplored by the Russian criminal law doctrine. But it is very unique because it comprises the combination of Austrian, German and Russian criminal law ideas which is conditioned by historical peculiarities of this state’s development. On the example of Slovakia, the author demonstrates possibility of combining the national legal legacy and directives of the European Union.