Constitutional and legal nature of rulings of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation
Authors:   West Siberian Branch of the Russian State University of Justice, Filimonov Yuri V. 
Published: October 2024

The legal nature of the rulings of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation in cases on the recognition of normative acts or their individual provisions as constitutional in the interpretation of the Constitution of the Russian Federation is of interpretative nature, they belong to the category of law-explanatory, i.e. law-enforcement acts. At the same time, the rulings of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation, being judicial acts, are endowed in accordance with Art. 6, 75, 78, 78, 79, 80, 81 of the Federal Law "On the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation" with the properties of normativity, - are able to influence the subject of regulation; extend their force to an indefinite circle of persons-addressees of law enforcement; are designed for repeated application; are final and are not reviewed by other bodies; are subject to official publication. These legal provisions derive from paragraphs 1, 4, 5, 6, 8 of Article 125 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation. The precepts and recommendations of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation contained in its rulings are taken into account by the legislator when improving the Russian legislation, and they help law-enforcers to be guided by legal norms in the identified constitutional-legal sense. Interpretation by the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation of a normative act or some of its provisions, acting as one of the main forms of judicial constitutional control, influences social relations by explaining to the subjects of legal relations how they should determine the decisions they make and the boundaries of their behaviour. Thus, the effectiveness of the regulatory influence of the norms of the Constitution of the Russian Federation and sectoral legislation is increased, uncertainty in legal understanding and inconsistency in the practice of law enforcement are eliminated. The legislator, by changing the wording of part 5 of Article 79 of the Law on the Constitutional Court, supplemented and strengthened the powers of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation to interpret certain provisions of the Constitution of the Russian Federation and normative legal acts for the purpose of their proper clarification, elimination of uncertainties and conflicts in their application. A number of authors assess the normative interpretation carried out by the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation as judicial law-making. But this viewpoint is caused to a greater extent by the peculiarities of constitutional justice, which analyses constitutional norms, concepts, constructions, characterised by a high degree of generality and abstractness, which expands the limits of their interpretation and allows to give constitutional-legal meaning to the norms under review, sometimes not even coinciding with their textual writing in normative-legal acts. In any case, the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation in the system of legal regulation cannot go beyond jurisdictional powers, it is limited by the principles and norms of law, constitutional values, objectively established social relations.