Administrative Procedure Law

a branch of law, the aggregate of rules regulating the social relations that arise and develop during the examination and settlement of administrative cases in the sphere of state administration.

Administrative procedure law determines the mode of accepting and examining citizens’ statements and complaints by the administration, the mode of issuing a number of administrative acts—including acts on applying administrative compulsion—and the mode of solving disputes between parties to administrative and legal relations. It establishes procedural guarantees of the rights of citizens and other participants to administrative process, the mode of investigating, hearing, and settling cases pertaining to administrative offenses, and so on. The following norms of administrative procedure law can be distinguished: norms that establish and confirm the general principles of the administrative process; norms that define specific rights and duties of the participants to the administrative process; norms that regulate the competence of the organs that solve administrative cases and the mode of hearing these cases; norms that establish procedural time limits at all phases of the administrative process; and norms that regulate the procedure of complaining and protesting against decisions.

In the USSR the norms of administrative procedure law are confirmed by a number of legislative acts of the USSR and Union republics—among them, legislation on applying administrative fines and other administrative actions, statutes on administrative commissions, and statutes on the commissions on affairs of minors.