Fundamentals of Legal Regulation of the Status of Honorary Consuls

The relevance of this topic is determined by the trends of globalization and the development of bilateral cooperation between states, which leads to more and more frequent appeals to the institution of the honorary consul, as well as the need for a normative definition of legal status and bringing it to a uniform standard of national legislation. The purpose of the article is to reveal the peculiarities of the normative regulation features of the honorary consuls' legal status in Ukraine, highlight and analyze the legislation's shortcomings in this area, and provide proposals for resolving the existing legal uncertainty. Achieving the outlined purpose became possible thanks to the use complex of methods of scientific knowledge at various levels, in particular, the dialectical method (to identify and analyze the peculiarities of the normative regulation of the status of an honorary consul, differences in practical application, as well as the justification of introducing changes to the existing system), the comparative legal method (to establish the content of legal norms and analyze the practice of application), the method of analysis and synthesis (to highlight aspects and criteria that collectively determine the legal status of an honorary consul), the observation method (to highlight the experience of other countries), as well as a number of traditional for jurisprudence methods such as: historical, systematic and logical. The article analyzes the current legislation defining the status of honorary consuls, and highlights the problematic aspects of such "evaluative concepts" as "prominent position", "important social status" and "active participation in political life", which are widely used by the lawmaker, and also analyzes how in practice, the presence of evaluative concepts can lead to real misapplication. As a result of the conducted research, conclusions were formulated regarding the need to delineate the limits of the use of evaluative concepts in determining the legal status of an honorary consul, as well as the need to supplement existing regulatory acts with standards that would clearly distinguish the area within which honorary consuls should use their powers without violating the legislative requirements.