Complaints went up – Newspaper Kommersant No. 5 (7450) dated 01/13/2023

The new rules, which complicated the procedure for applying to the Constitutional Court (CC), did not affect the number of complaints to the highest court: after a decline in 2021, the statistics of appeals went up again, follows from the data published on the website of the court. However, experts believe that it is too early to talk about “import substitution” by the Constitutional Court of the functions that were previously performed by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR): little time has passed, and their jurisdictions are still different.

Over the past year, the number of applications to the Constitutional Court has grown by almost 10%, according to statistics published on the website of the court. In total, in 2022, the court received 12,933 appeals – a little over a thousand more than a year earlier. By the way, at the end of 2021, a record decrease in the number of complaints received by the Constitutional Court was recorded, which generally reflects the general trend: the highest figure was recorded in 2009 (20,629 complaints), and since then their number has been constantly decreasing. In addition, in 2021, new rules came into force, established at the end of 2020 by amendments to the law on the Constitutional Court: an additional condition for the admissibility of a complaint about a violation of constitutional rights and freedoms was the exhaustion of all other domestic judicial remedies.

However, last year a trend reversal was recorded, which seemed to surprise even the chairman of the Constitutional Court Valery Zorkin – he himself admitted this at a meeting with the president in December 2022. “What is surprising, Vladimir Vladimirovich,” Mr. Zorkin said then, “we have undergone a significant change after the amendments were made to the Constitution and the federal constitutional law. They made it so that you can apply to the Constitutional Court only when a citizen has gone through all the instances, that is, the Supreme Court … So I want to say that the number of complaints has not decreased, despite the fact that, it would seem, everyone said that difficult to access.”

As follows from the published statistics, most of all citizens were concerned about the issues of criminal law and procedure – they account for 4494 appeals, that is, more than a third of the total. In second place are problems affecting the constitutional status of the individual, including personal and political rights (here, citizens were most concerned about the right to judicial protection and problems of social protection). The least of all Russians were concerned about issues of international law – there were only 14 appeals on this issue.

Olga Kryazhkova, Associate Professor of the Department of Constitutional Law at the Russian State University of Justice, believes that it is too early to talk about a new trend in the number of applications to the Constitutional Court, even taking into account Russia’s withdrawal from the jurisdiction of the ECHR (the Russian authorities have explicitly stated that it is necessary to ensure “import substitution” in this area will be CS). Perhaps we should talk about stabilizing the number of complaints, the expert argues. And we, apparently, will feel the effect of the break with the ECHR (if it happens at all) a little later: in this sense, 2023 and 2024 should be more indicative, adds Ms. Kryazhkova.

“I would not exaggerate the growth in the number of applications to the Constitutional Court: an increase of 10% does not seem to me so significant that it can be taken seriously as an indicator of a certain trend or a break in the legal trend,” agrees a senior partner at the Pen & Paper Bar Association and a former deputy chairman of the committee of the Federation Council according to the constitutional legislation Konstantin Dobrynin. The exclusion of the Russian Federation from the Council of Europe, of course, could partly affect the growth of people’s interest in other, but similar to the ECHR, mechanisms for the legal protection of their violated rights, the expert notes. But at the same time, in his opinion, we must honestly admit that our Constitutional Court is not and cannot be an adequate “replacement” or a kind of “import substitution” for the ECHR, since their jurisdiction differs significantly.

The past year was also a record year for the Constitutional Court in terms of the number of decisions made, Olga Kryazhkova emphasizes: there were a total of 59 of them, four more than in 2021. True, there were also just four “emergency” decisions on the constitutionality of treaties on the entry of new territories into the Russian Federation, she recalls. But fewer so-called definitions with positive content were adopted (formally they contain a refusal to accept the appeal for consideration, but actually resolve the issue raised in the complaint), the expert adds: there were only two of them last year against nine in 2021.

Anastasia Kornya