Ar konstitucinis teismas savo nutarimuose gali išeiti už pradinio kreipimosi ribu?
Does the Constitutional Court of Lithuania Have the Power to Go Beyond the Scope of the Petition Before It?

Summary/Abstract: The Constitutional Court is the only court in Lithuania that has a power to judge the constitutionality of laws and regulations and the only institution which has a right of official interpretation of the Constitution. The Constitution guarantees fundamental human rights and freedoms and defines the relationship between the authorities and public. Constitutional control is essential to ensure that these values are preserved, especially in a country with a short tradition of parliamentary democracy. Therefore, the judicial process of constitutional control has to be performed only for this purpose and strictly within the scope of the Constitution. In the practice of the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Lithuania there are examples of the Court deciding and ruling on the conformity of the legal acts with other chapters and principles of the Constitution that are written in the original petition. Moreover, the Court sometimes rules on the constitutionality of other legal acts that are not questioned by a petitioner. The principal of constitutional justice calls for a revocation of a law or regulation that violates the Constitution. But the Constitutional Court may not stay aside and not react when it suspects unconstitutionality of a law or regulation within the scope of the case. On the other hand, the Court does not have a right to initiate the judicial process of constitutional verification of laws or regulations. Therefore, the question rises – is it a violation of the Court’s authority when the constitutional procedure is started on its own initiative, or is it an appropriate way to guarantee adequate constitutional control? The judicial practice of the Lithuanian Constitutional Court has the experience of only ten years. This is quite a short period of time to form a constitutional doctrine, therefore, there are just a few academic publications on this subject. The hypothesis put forward in this article implies that rulings of the Constitutional Court,

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