Abstract
Abstract Although 4 July 2020 saw the coming into force of constitutional changes in Russia, this was far from the end of the story. Most clearly, these changes to the 1993 constitution required implementation, including through amendments to, and the writing of new pieces of, federal legislation. In part, this process was the mundane work of legal bureaucrats, tweaking and creating many pieces of legislation to reflect the new constitutional text. But the implementation process also reveals much more about the broader constitutional reform project. This article reviews the implementation process, discussing its complexity, the improvisation shown when fleshing out certain new constitutional details, its relationship with other political developments, and the chasm laid bare between Putin’s promise of the rebalancing of power in his 15 January 2020 Address to the Federal Assembly versus the reality of reform in practice.
Highlights
On 11 December 2020, Pavel Krasheninnikov—chairman of the State Duma Committee on State Construction and Legislation, and co-chair of the Working Group on Monitoring the Realisation of Constitutional Changes—provided a status update on these legal developments.[2]
The implementation process reveals much more about the broader constitutional reform project
This article reviews the implementation process, discussing its complexity, the improvisation shown when fleshing out certain new constitutional details, its relationship with other political developments, and the chasm laid bare between Putin’s promise of the rebalancing of power in his 15 January 2020 Address to the Federal Assembly versus the reality of reform in practice
Summary
Up to 11 December 2020, President Putin had formally sponsored four ‘packets’ of draft legislation implementing constitutional changes. 2.1 Bill Order and Importance This first cluster of implementation bills includes those relating to key political institutions (for example, the Government), initiatives personally important to Putin (for example, on immunity for former presidents), and initiatives relating to important questions of state sovereignty (for example, on the priority of the constitution over decisions of international bodies) It is distinctly sootvetstvie s popravkami k Konstitutsii Rossiiskoi Federatsii)”, SOZD, https://sozd.duma. Via free access principal is not the people but senior state officials—their superiors in the ‘unified system of public power’
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