The new format for commenting on the Russian Constitution: the Austro-German project

Analyzing the provisions of the first detailed foreign commentary on the Russian Constitution edited by Professor Wieser, the authors consider what role the present book plays for the development of the doctrine of constitutional law and the systematization of the Russian Constitutional Court’s practice. The Commentary under review is also a reference book and contains an extensive bibliography, as well as a thorough list of the Russian Constitutional Court’s decisions, systematized as of July 2014. Confirming the value of such a standard for writing commentaries, known in the countries of the German legal tradition, the authors of the article see the prospect for developing such a genre of commentary-handbooks in Russian legal literature. Relying on the interpretations of the Russian constitutional reality proposed in the Commentary and based on the external view, the authors identify areas for further discussion around known constitutional concepts and phenomena that until now have remained in the shadows of the mainstream interest and have not yet been resolved. First and foremost, this concerns the issues of the correlation of constitutional principles and rights, the limits of the normative content (sphere of protection) of constitutional rights and freedoms, and the encroachment of the right and the assessment of their constitutionality. As examples, confirming the need to handle these issues, comments were chosen on constitutional provisions on the principle of free elections, on the dignity of the individual, on the protection of private life, on the freedom of assembly, and on guarantees for the judicial protection of human rights and freedoms.

About the authors: Elena Gritsenko – Doctor of Sciences in Law, Professor, Department of Constitutional Law, State University of Saint Petersburg, Saint Petersburg, Russia; Maria Proskuryakova – Candidate of Sciences (Ph.D.) in Law, Saint Petersburg, Russia.

Citation: Gritsenko E., Proskuryakova M. (2018) Novyy format kommentariya k rossiyskoy Konstitutsii: avstriysko-germanskiy proekt: Retsenziya: Handbuch der russischen Verfassung / B.Wieser (Hrsg.). Wien: Verlag Österreich, 2014 [The new format for commenting on the Russian Constitution: the Austro-German project: A book review: Handbuch der russischen Verfassung / B.Wieser (Hrsg.). Wien: Verlag Österreich, 2014]. Sravnitel’noe konstitutsionnoe obozrenie, vol. 27, no. 2, pp. 116–127. (In Russian).

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