Вопросы этнической идентификации граждан Российской Федерации

Abstract

Introduction: the Constitution of the Russian Federation has proclaimed the right of everyone to freely determine and indicate their nationality as a reflection of the result of self-identification, commitment of the individual to certain language, culture, customs and traditions of the nations and nationalities living within the territory of the state. Purpose: to study the mechanism of implementation of this constitutional right, to determine the possibilities of individual and group ethnic identification of citizens of the Russian Federation, to determine the directions for improving the legal regulation in this area. Methods: during the research, both general scientific and special methods of scientific cognition have been widely used. The achievement of the goal set in the work, to a greater extent, has become possible thanks to the use of formal-logical and comparative-legal methods, as well as the method of generalization of legal doctrines in combination with a systematic analysis of the legislation. Results: the author comes to the conclusion that the norms of the current legislation do not allow to formalize the result of the ethnic self-identification of the individual. The official documents, which nevertheless contain an indication of the nationality of a person, allow talking about the secondary and static nature of the mechanism for the implementation of the right in question, since they are not aimed at fixing exactly the nationality, and also do not provide for the possibility of their re-registration due to the changes in ethnic preferences. The considered collective forms of national and cultural self-determination allow making an assumption about the need to prove belonging to certain ethnic communities, which in itself connects the process of identifying citizens not with their own will, but with the presence or absence of legal facts determined by the legislator. Conclusions: the activity of using the studied constitutional law is seen by the author in the legal regulation and practical implementation of the possibility of specifying the nationality in the main document certifying the identity of a citizen of the Russian Federation. Based on the conducted research, the proposals have been made to improve the mechanism of the legal regulation of the studied sphere of public relations.