The Duma took up hangings – Kommersant

The State Duma at a plenary session on Thursday rejected three initiatives of the opposition to change the electoral legislation under a simplified procedure. Two more bills on the same topic were returned to the authors by the council of the chamber on Wednesday. All these documents were submitted to the Duma in the last convocation and lay dormant until the Duma leadership announced another campaign to clear up legislative blockages.

Speaker of the State Duma Vyacheslav Volodin has recently raised the topic of “hanging”. At the end of February, at a meeting of the House, he gave statistics on the bills that have been in committees without movement since the beginning of the convocation. Most of the documents are “stuck” in the Committee on State Building and Legislation, through which more initiatives traditionally pass than through other committees. In second place was the committee on economic policy, in third – on transport. At the same time, the seventh convocation also left a rich legacy, which the committees set about raking at the call of the leadership of the Duma. The chairman of the chamber himself is considering two “pendants” – the initiative of the communists to replace the Russian tricolor with a red flag (introduced on April 19 last year) and the new version of the law on funeral business proposed by the United Russia group (introduced on March 21 last year). According to the Duma’s database, both initiatives were sent to Vyacheslav Volodin, but never passed to the next stage, which implies their distribution among relevant committees.

On April 20, the Duma rejected three electoral-related opposition bills under a simplified procedure. It implies that if the bill was introduced during the work of previous convocations and recommended by the responsible committee for rejection, then consideration is limited to a brief report by the representative of the committee, after which the deputies proceed to vote. The author of one of these bills, Oleg Smolin (KPRF), proposed to ban the use in campaigning of the image of persons holding public office and not being candidates. The deputy proposed to allow using images of other people not connected with the civil service with their consent. The State Construction Committee considered this a violation of equal opportunities for all candidates, noting also that the ban on the use of state officials in campaigning is already implemented in the legislation.

The draft law of the deputies of A Just Russia – For Truth (SRZP) on the abolition of multi-day voting was also rejected. According to the conclusion of the State Construction Committee, this practice has shown its effectiveness. Also, the initiative of the Liberal Democratic Party on the admissibility of combining the status of a lawyer with the exercise of parliamentary powers on a non-permanent basis was rejected by the Duma. The bar is a professional community and “as an institution of civil society is not included in the system of state authorities and local governments,” the committee concluded.

On April 19, the Duma Council returned a number of bills to their authors. Among them are the amendments of the Liberal Democratic Party, which establish additional requirements for candidates for the highest public office. For example, party members proposed to oblige candidates to provide the Central Election Commission with a written consent to conduct verification activities against them to identify grounds for refusing access to state secrets. The Liberal Democrats also wanted to oblige candidates to provide the CEC with a certificate of the absence of diseases incompatible with the work of the president. Finally, the authors of the bill considered it necessary to limit the passive suffrage of those who did not serve in the army on conscription without legal grounds, since this is not consistent with the status of the country’s supreme commander in chief. The Duma Council justified its decision by saying that the law, which is being amended, has become invalid (a new version of the law on presidential elections was adopted in December 2022). For the same reason, the SRHR initiative was returned to the authors to increase the minimum share of mandates distributed according to party lists in regional parliaments from 25% to 50%. Recall that at the end of 2021, the law “On the General Principles of Organizing Public Power in the Subjects of the Russian Federation” was adopted, according to which the regions themselves can determine the number of deputies elected to the legislature according to party lists.

“This is the second such big general cleaning of dusty cabinets with bills,” explains political scientist Pavel Sklyanchuk. “If five years ago it was said that the initiatives were inherited by the deputies, now the debris is cleared as a KPI for the work of the Duma committees.” First of all, the opposition repeatedly complained about the delay in consideration, the expert recalls: “But the bills of the United Russia deputies in committees headed by deputies from other factions have now begun to pass faster.”

Ksenia Veretennikova