№ 9 (18)
The main topic of the current issue of the journal is the interview of Mr Valery D. Zorkin,
the President of the Russian Federation Constitutional Court, wherein he addresses the
role of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms
in the Russian law: «In modern-day conditions, the Convention in fact transforms into
sui generis all-European constitution of human and constitutional rights and liberties,
while in Russia, who is a part of the European legal arena, the Convention is an integral
part of our legal system».
At the same time, Mr Valery D. Zorkin noted, the European Court of Human Rights
and its judicial acts are subsidiary instruments: «The mission of the Strasbourg Court
is not that it has to shift the burden of national States to protect human rights onto some
supranational institutions, but first and foremost, to see that by the means of precedential
decisions uniform apprehension and application of the of the Convention provisions
are followed by the domestic courts, thus “taking rights back home”. It follows that
the Russian courts are under obligation to secure implantation of the Convention onto
the fabric of the Russia’s legal arena». «Judgments and decisions by the Strasbourg
Court construing provisions of the Convention are of universal precedential value
for all countries participating in the Convention and legal approaches pertaining to
the interpretation of the Convention are the rules of binding nature».
In his interview, the President of the Russian Federation Constitutional Court also
directed attention to the need of the increase of the domestic judiciary’s potential and
of the use of the domestic remedies applied before going to the European Court.
Mr Zorkin also touched upon the issue of the judicial supervisory review procedure
in the legal system of Russia, as well as the issue of «binding force» of judgments of
the Russian Federation Constitutional Court.
The materials of the September issue of the journal differ from the customary
set of materials not only because we published the interview of the President of
the Russian Federation Constitutional Court, but also in view of the content of the
foreign section of the journal: it contains the material on the Protocol No. 14 to the
Convention in three languages, Russian, English and French. Among other materials,
we publish the translation of the text of the Protocol No. 14 to the Convention to
Russian; the translation underwent an expert assessment at the European Court of
Human Rights and is published under the editorship of Mr Anatoly Kovler, the judge
of the European Court. It was our special request to have this expert assessment of the
Russian translation of the Protocol No. 14 to the Convention in order to prevent any
discord in construction of terms and provisions of the document on the threshold of its
taking legal effect after the ratification by the Russian Federation.
Vitaly Portnov
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