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of the general staff and the regimental colonels, but also of "an
outstanding and worthy individual from each regiment."
Articles 11-16 protected the rights of towns, limited the taxation of
peasants and poor Cossacks, and restricted the innkeepers.

Task 9. Read the texts and make the written translation of the texts
into Ukrainian.
І. The term constitution comes from Latin and originates from the
word constitutio which means structure, establishment. "The Dictionary of
the Words of Foreign Origin" defines constitution as the "supreme law
which provides the basis for the political, economic and legal systems of
the state. The Constitution outlines the form of the government, the
procedure to establish central and local state bodies as well as their powers
and the principles of functioning; it also defines the election system, the
rights and obligations of the citizens, the organization and principles of
administering justice etc.
The sources of contemporary European Constitutionalism could be
traced to medieval England, where in 1215 king John Lackland, under the
pressure of rebelled barons and citizens, had to approve of the Magna
Charta, which for the first time in history legally limited the king's power.
The first world-wide known constitution was the Constitution of the
United States of America adopted in 1787. The young democratic state,
established by the colonists from Europe in North America, immediately
legally secured the separation of powers, the sovereign will of the people,
the provision of natural human rights. The Bill of Rights, adopted in 1791,
and incorporated into the US Constitution, specifically concerns the
human rights issues.

ІІ. The task of any constitution is to establish specific rules for the
most important social relations. Article I of the Constitution of Ukraine
deals with this issue.
This article states that: "Ukraine is a sovereign and independent,
democratic, social, law-governed state."
Sovereignty is one of the oldest categories of the constitutional law.
In the medieval times the word sovereign was synonymic to monarch. In
the XVI century J. Bodin, an outstanding thinker, suggested the idea of
public sovereignty, according to which people are the only source of
power in any state. "Sovereignty and independence of a state mean that its
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