The role of courts and law enforcement agencies in ensuring the protection of spiritual and moral values

Abstract

The elevation of traditional spiritual and moral values to the rank of a strategic national priority has confronted the judiciary and law enforcement agencies with a task that long lacked a clear legal toolkit: a value category, extralegal by its nature, must acquire an operational expression in law enforcement without losing the certainty demanded by the principle of legal certainty. The tension between the axiological nature of the protected good and the formal legal guarantees of the participants in proceedings forms the central problem of this work. The aim is to establish through which substantive and procedural mechanisms courts and agencies of public order participate in protecting values and which conflicts arise. The study applies formal legal analysis of the current legislation, generalisation of the practice of the Constitutional and Supreme Courts, and comparison of the functions of individual links in the law enforcement system. It is shown that courts realise value protection predominantly in a mediated manner — through interpretation of the evaluative elements of offences and constitutional interpretation — whereas prosecutorial bodies and the communications regulator rely on preventive administrative instruments. A discrepancy is revealed between the declarative breadth of the value catalogue and the narrow set of sanction-backed prohibitions, which shifts the principal burden onto judicial discretion. The emerging model retains stability not through expansion of the repressive apparatus but through the development of uniform qualification criteria that keep value protection within the bounds of legal form and compatible with individual guarantees.