Legal and Technical Defects of Constitutional Amendments of 2020

Abstract

The quality of legal and technical elaboration of amendments to the Constitution of the Russian Federation, approved by the all-Russian vote on July 1, 2020, does not correspond to the level of the Basic Law. Oddly enough, the constitutional legislator ignored a number of basic technical means, rules and methods of legal technique. Thus, the constitutional amendments were drafted without taking into account the requirements of the structural organization of the legal act, namely: many new norms were included in inappropriate articles, the transitional provision on "resetting the deadlines" was duplicated in the main text of the Constitution. The authors of the amendments abandoned criteria of efficiency and compactness of legislative norms, having included an identical set of restrictions in nine articles of the Constitution in relation to various categories of officials. The text does not meet the requirement for uniformity of legal regulation, legal structures, the unity, simplicity and brevity of terminology: the scope of constitutional restrictions for various categories of officials differs somewhat without any objective reasons; there is no uniformity in the issue of the possibility of establishing additional requirements for officials by laws, “bifurcation” of the titles for senators (who in Chapter 9 of the Constitution are still referred to as members of the Federation Council). Insufficient attention to the requirement of consistency of legal norms has led to the creation of a new contradiction between Art. 71 and 72 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation. Amendments also have a number of other legal and technical defects. Such serious and numerous defects in the legal technique of amendments to the Constitution of the Russian Federation became a natural result of a steady decline in the quality of federal legislation that has lasted for a long time. Constitutional amendments clearly demonstrate an insufficient level of legal culture in our country, which sharply raises the question of a radical improvement in the quality of legal technology, and legislative technology in particular.