Application of criminal law norms with the blanket dispositions and debatable issues of indirect decriminalization

One of the debatable issues in the theory and practice of the application of criminal law norms with the blanket dispositions is the determination of the legal consequences of indirect decriminalization. We are talking about a situation when a criminal offense committed in the past is no longer such, because there have been changes in the legal act to which the criminal law norm with a blanket disposition is referring. At present, it can be asserted that there are three scientific approaches to solving this problem. Representatives of the first approach, which we tentatively called "positivist", believe that the change of legal acts, to which the criminal law norm with a blanket disposition is referring, does not entail the retroactive effect of the criminal statute, since Art. 5 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine only provides for changes made to the criminal statute, not to other legal acts. In their opinion, decriminalization does not occur in this way, therefore, the criminal proceedings should continue in the usual way, and the person is subject to criminal liability, inasmuch as his behavior, at the time of the commission, was criminally illegal. The inadmissibility of this approach lies in the fact that a person is subject to criminal liability for an act that is currently not criminally punishable. The second approach (which is based on the distinction between law and statute) is formed by the position of scientists who perceive the criminal statute and the additional normative ground of the criminal-legal qualification as elements of a single system object – the criminal-legal norm. This is giving them grounds to conclude about the possibility of the retroactive effect of the criminal law norm, if the additional normative ground of the criminal law qualification has undergone changes. The controversy of this approach lies in the fact that Art. 5 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine formally is providing for the retroactive effect of the criminal statute itself, and not of the criminal law norm. Representatives of the third approach (which is based on taking into account the interbranch relations of criminal law) agree with indirect decriminalization, with the fact that a person should not be subject to criminal liability for behavior that is not criminally illegal at the moment, but the decision in this regard is proposed to be based not on Art. 5 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, and on part 1 Art. 58 of the Constitution of Ukraine. Taking into account the long debate on indirect decriminalization and the existence of several theoretical approaches to solving the problem of the retroactive effect of statutes and other normative legal acts in the case of the application of criminal law norms with a blanket disposition, it would be appropriate to remove the ambiguity of the issue at the level of criminal statute.