The Constitutional Court protected academic freedom and labor rights of university teachers

The Constitutional Court obliged employers to extend fixed-term employment contracts for at least three years with teachers who successfully passed the competition, even when transferring them to another position. This decision, published on Wednesday on the court’s website, was the result of the struggle of former teachers of the Higher School of Economics for their labor rights. According to the expert, it will now become more difficult for university administrations to avoid concluding employment contracts with employees.

As Kommersant previously reported, a review of several articles of the Labor Code (LC) was carried out by the Constitutional Court (CC) in connection with a complaint from a former teacher at the Higher School of Economics (NRU HSE) Irina Alabastrova. In 2020, she successfully passed the next competition to fill a teaching position and continued to work, although she was not signed a new employment contract or additional agreements to the old one.

As a general rule, in such cases a fixed-term employment contract becomes indefinite, but several HSE teachers instead suddenly received notice of a transfer to another position and the upcoming termination of their employment relationship.

In the courts, the university administration appealed, in particular, to Art. 332 of the Labor Code, which gives the right to conclude a fixed-term employment contract with teachers who have passed the competition. However, the applicant noted in her complaint, with this interpretation of labor legislation, the university administration has the right to unilaterally determine the term of the employment contract, which violates the constitutional right to work and protection from unemployment, and also leads to an imbalance of interests between the employee and the employer. At the same time, not only the labor rights of the teacher suffer, Ms. Alabastrova emphasized, freedom of scientific creativity and teaching is also under threat.

KS agreed with her. In his resolution (.pdf) it is noted that the employer’s arbitrary determination of the period for which, by agreement of the parties, a fixed-term employment contract with a teaching worker is extended, “does not provide adequate guarantees of the stability of the legal status of teaching staff and their sustainable employment, and leads to restrictions on rights and freedoms that go beyond constitutionally permissible limits.” infringement of the constitutional right to freely dispose of one’s ability to work, deprivation of the opportunity to fully realize the constitutional freedoms of scientific creativity and teaching, violation of the principles of respect for the work of citizens and working people, and thereby does not comply with the Constitution of the Russian Federation.”

At the same time, the Constitutional Court recalled that in 2022 it had already spoken out on this issue in a ruling on the complaint of Alexey Podakov and even recognized that the practice of concluding short-term contracts does not guarantee the labor rights of employees.

Then the Constitutional Court obliged the legislator to specify the existing norms (the corresponding amendments were adopted last summer), and before that it ordered the conclusion of an employment contract with university teachers for a period of at least three years. Since this period has already expired for the applicant, she can only count on compensation, the form and amount of which must be established by the Basmanny Court, which considered in the first instance the case on the protection of Ms. Alabastrova’s labor rights, says the decision published on October 25.

Irina Alabastrova told Kommersant that she would definitely apply for compensation, which in theory should be calculated based on the average salary for three years. At the same time, she pointed out that the Constitutional Court only partially answered the questions posed to it and did not fully extend general labor guarantees to teachers, first of all, the right to apply for an indefinite employment contract if it was not renewed after the expiration of a fixed-term one. Instead, the Constitutional Court focused on the transfer from one position to another and its consequences, the applicant noted.

Lawyer Ivan Brikulsky, who participated in the preparation of the complaint, considers the decision of the Constitutional Court an important step towards teachers and towards the protection of constitutional freedom of teaching in general.

“It was very important for us that the Constitutional Court agreed with many of the arguments in our complaint: about the legal uncertainty of part 9 of Article 332 of the Labor Code, about the imbalance of the parties to the employment contract, about the violation of the principle of equality, and especially about the arbitrariness of the university administration,” he emphasizes. Mr. Brikulsky recalls that even earlier, HSE teachers Ilya Guryanov and Elena Lukyanova tried to draw the attention of the Constitutional Court to this problem, but less successfully (the Constitutional Court refused to consider their complaints, citing a decision that had already been made). However, the very fact of issuing a ruling in the case of Irina Alabastrova after the “Podakov case” already indicates that the problem of relations between the university and the teacher is not being solved at the systemic level, the lawyer adds: the Constitutional Court is forced, as it were, to “clean up” legislative flaws, to be “a reaper, a Swiss and a blacksmith overnight.” The courts will be obliged to apply the positions formulated by the court in this decision in the cases of other teachers, Ivan Brikulsky is sure.

The decision of the Constitutional Court should have a positive impact on the practice of labor relations with teaching staff of universities, agrees Vladislav Vatamanyuk, managing partner of the Vatamanyuk & Partners group, because it is intended to exclude cases of evasion by the employer from concluding an employment contract. This approach creates certainty in the sphere of legal relations with teaching staff selected through a competition and makes it possible to exclude abuses on the part of employers, the expert states.

Anastasia Kornya