Restriction of Passive Suffrage for a Citizen Having a Criminal Record under the Law of the Russian Federation

Abstract

Introduction. At the present stage of the Russian national statehood development, strengthening the institutions of democracy and civil society remains an important task. One of the efficient ways to solve this problem is to create a highperformance mechanism, which would implement and ensure the fundamental rights and freedoms of a person. It is important for this mechanism to provide the legal stipulation in the current legislation of the Russian Federation and further implementation of the objective and justified restrictions of the rights and freedoms of a person. With regard to the passive suffrage, based on the analysis of the Constitution of the Russian Federation2, such a restriction is expressed in the exclusion of the persons having a criminal record from a number of citizens endowed with this right. The relevance of the paper lies in the need to legally regulate the features of suffrage restriction for the citizens having a criminal record. The work aims to study the eligibility of restricting the passive suffrage due to the candidate’s criminal record, and the limits of such restriction.Materials and Methods. The normative legal acts regulating the passive suffrage restriction due to the criminal record presence became the materials under the research. A set of methods of scientific cognition, including the dialectical and legalistic methods, as well as the methods of analysis, synthesis, induction and deduction, formed a methodological framework of the research.Results. The paper substantiates the legal essence of the human and civil rights and freedoms restriction through defining the limits of the person's freedom in society and in the state. In the paper the conclusion is made, that along with the great importance of the human rights and freedoms protection, there exists an urgent need to comply with the legal restriction of these rights to ensure safety of other people and society as a whole. The analysis of the normative legal acts allows us to conclude that the restrictions of passive suffrage are legally stipulated directly in the text of the Constitution of the Russian Federation (Part 3 of art. 32), as well as in the Federal Laws, as referred to in Part 3 of Article 55 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation. Moreover, with regard to the latter set of passive suffrage restrictions, the trend to expand the grounds for them is observed during the last twenty years. Thus, currently a rather wide range of citizens are forfeited the passive suffrage.Discussion and Conclusion. A specific feature of the Russian suffrage is its constant transformation caused by the changing political situation. The suffrage is actively developing and improving with rely on studying the scientific concepts of the constitutional scholars and proposals of the practitioners in organisation of the elections. However, there are still many issues that require scientific reflection and further legislative stipulation. It is proposed to focus on the problem of restricting the passive suffrage for a citizen for the reason of him having a criminal record