Some current issues of constitutional justice development in Russia

In developing a strategy of constitutional justice, the Russian Constitutional Court, which operates as a body for the protection of the Russian Constitution, is responsible for the proper understanding, definition, formulation, and objectively necessary substantive development of its own competence. With regard to the protection of human rights and civic freedoms, the Constitutional Court should also be both the vehicle and guardian of international standards of law. Effective constitutional control could not come into existence without the Court and a system of necessary measures for implementing its decisions, as well as without the Court paving the way for necessary changes in legal regulation and instructions for reviewing earlier decisions of other courts to protect and restore violated constitutional provisions and rights. Thanks to this position of the Constitutional Court, reforming Russia’s judicial review system – overdue for a long time – has become possible. Nevertheless, there is still a need to further develop constitutional justice to a new level of quality that maintains a balance between the right to fair justice, the possibility of correcting judicial errors, and the principle of legal certainty. The Constitutional Court provides interpretation of new norms that regulate the access of citizens to constitutional justice, and this interpretation is based on legal positions already developed by the Court. These norms on the rights and freedoms of citizens could only be interpreted broadly, and any restriction, unless stipulated in the law, should not exist. Only within constitutional justice are checks and interpretations of the law on its organization and process possible.

About the author: Tamara Morshchakova – Judge of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation (in ret.), Professor and Head of the Judiciary Department, Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia.

Citation: Morshchakova T. (2017) O nekotorykh aktual’nykh problemakh rossiyskogo konstitutsionnogo pravosudiya [Some actual issues of constitutional justice development in Russia]. Sravnitel’noe konstitutsionnoe obozrenie, no.3, pp.117–124. (In Russian).

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