PROBLEMATIC ASPECTS OF LITHUANIAN LEGAL REGULATION OF IMPEACHMENT PROCEDURE TO A MEMBER OF LOCAL MUNICIPAL COUNCIL

Although members and mayors of municipal councils are not included in the list of persons who may be subject of Impeachment proceedings under the Constitution, a peculiar variant of the institute of Impeachment is the procedure of premature loss of authority of a mayor or a member of the local municipal council, which is established in Article 25 (1) of the Law on Local Self‐ Government of the Republic of Lithuania. In a democratic system it is vitally important that every local politician who takes an oath takes full responsibility, regardless of whether he works in the majority or minority of the municipal council and/or to which political force he belongs. The problematic aspect is that it is very complicated to initiate the impeachment proceedings on a politician who belongs to the majority and has broken the oath, and there are almost no practical possibilities to complete it as such possibilities remain only theoretical and very poorly feasible. The main tasks of the research is to determine practical and theoretical possibilities to initiate Impeachment proceedings against politiciansin the majority;to revealthe essential problematic aspects of legal regulation of Impeachment procedure to a member (or a mayor) of municipal council and to draw some solutions related to these questions analysed for Lithuanian legislator in order to improve national legal regulation. The research was carried out by employing logical, comparative, system analysis, monitoring, linguistic, empirical, synthesis and generalization methods.