Political reasoning in the decisions of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation: analysis of the Judgment of July 14, 2015, No. 21-P

This article offers a method of political and legal analysis for decisions of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation that allows us to differentiate between political and legal arguments of the Court. Judgment of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation No.21-P, dated July 14, 2015, which contains an interpretation of the constitutional norm on the primacy of international law, was selected as the object of this research. This Judgment effectively enshrined the right of Russia, in exceptional cases, not to execute the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights. This resonant Judgment demonstrates the specifics of the arguments of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation that give rise to a discussion of the admissibility of this Resolution, along with not only legal, but also political arguments when deciding. While the legal side of this issue is amenable to detailed analysis, the political reasoning of Court decisions has not been adequately investigated. The author proposes a methodology for analyzing the court’s arguments that which takes into account a number of criteria, including the substantive nature of the reasoning, the peculiarities of the abstract value categories of the court, speech, and stylistic features. In addition to the text of the judicial act itself, the objects of the study were the publications of the Chairman of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation, current and former judges of the Russian Constitutional Court, representatives of the professional legal community, and the media. This analysis allows us to draw a number of conclusions regarding the features of the legitimization mechanism used by the Court in its decisions, and the proposed methodology can be applied in the future to analyze other decisions of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation.

About the author: Olga Komshukova – Lawyer, Ph.D. student, Graduate School of Political Sciences, Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia.

Citation: Komshukova O. (2019) Politicheskaya argumentatsiya v resheniyakh Konstitutsionnogo Suda Rossiyskoy Federatsii: analiz Postanovleniya ot 14 iyulya 2015 goda No.21-P [Political reasoning in the decisions of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation: analysis of the Judgment of July 14, 2015, No.21-P]. Sravnitel'noe konstitutsionnoe obozrenie, vol.28, no.3, pp.110–126. (In Russian).

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