Yuriy Radkovets
This Friday, 4 December, 2015, the State Duma of the Russian Federation (by the way, the next elections for it will take place September 18, 2016) approved in the second (general) and at once in the third (final) readings, a law that gives the Federal Constitutional Court the right to recognize it impossible to execute in Russia decisions of international courts if they violate the rule of the Russian Constitution. According to the latest amendments, the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation may recognize inexecutable decisions of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) and of other international courts, if they contradict the Russian Constitution.
This draft law was supported by 436 Deputies, three MPs were against it.
So what happened de facto and de jure in Russia this Friday?
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De jure — in Russia, actually, there was a coup
According to independent experts (including those of “Borysfen Intel”), de facto — the Constitution of the Russian Federation was changed in its unchangeable part. All the Deputies of the State Duma (436!) — participants of the action, hiding behind the rhetoric of “Russia's national interests”, in fact, committed the crime referred to as “treason.” While de jure — in Russia, actually, there was a coup prepared by the well-known group of persons by prior conspiracy.
In general, first Deputies of the State Duma had to vote for the amendment or reversal of Part 4 of Article 15 of the Constitution, namely, “Universally recognized principles and norms of international law and international treaties of the Russian Federation are an integral part of its legal system. If an international treaty of the Russian Federation establishes rules other than required by law, the rules of the international agreement are used”. Although, again, they have no right to vote for this even in the State Duma of the Russian Federation.
But in today's Putin's Russia everything is possible and any internal decree or law “covered by the State Duma's roof”, at any moment can cancel any international agreement or international treaty, at this, cynically violating international law. As an example, here is a far from being full list of Putin's Russia's recent rude violations of international acts:
- The Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe of November 19, 1990 (July 14, 2007 Russia's President V. Putin signed a Decree “On Suspension by the Russian Federation of the force of the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe and International Agreements Associated with It”);
- The Agreement on the Elimination of Intermediate-Range and Shorter-Range Missiles, of June, 1, 1988 (in the part of RF's continuation of the development and testing unilaterally missiles with a range more than 500 km);
- The Memorandum on Security Assurances in Connection with Ukraine's Accession to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, of December 5, 1994 (the so-called “Budapest Memorandum”);
- The Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership between Ukraine and the Russian Federation of May 31, 1997;
- The Agreement between Ukraine and the Russian Federation on the Ukrainian-Russian State Border of January 28, 2003. Thus, due to the criminal act of annexation of the Crimea in March 2014, there is no internationally recognized borders in Russia any longer — nearly for two years!
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The list goes on and continues not only in the military-political sphere, but also in trade, finance, intellectual, property rights, humanitarian, etc. As the saying goes, “Wherever one looks…”
In other words, last Friday it finally became clear that now the Russian Federation does not live by the law, but by its notions of the law, namely: by the codes of the underworld of the embittered collective “Putin-gopnik” from Leningrad gateway of the 1960s and by the notions of the mediocre “KGB Putin-loser” from the six-month courses of the Higher School of the KGB of the late 1970's.
Will now any civilized state or an international organization want to negotiate about anything with the Russian Federation living by its own codes and spitting on all interstate and international agreements and its own signatures on them. Why and, especially, about what now to negotiate with Putin's Russia, which de facto and de jure has abolished its own Article 15 of Part 4 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation, i.e. the primacy of international law.
So, today the Russian Federation officially demonstrates to the international community that it does not want to and will not adhere to the commitments assumed under international agreements signed and ratified by it, as well as to the norms and standards implemented in its internal (national) legislation.
So, according to this new approach, the Russian Federation will be able to violate (although it often did it in the past and continues to do now!) the aims and principles of the UN Charter — namely — the fixed therein basic principles of international law, which are also the mandatory norms.
Therefore, in our view, it is appropriate, and necessary to raise the question of depriving Russia of veto in the UN Security Council, and in general of its further membership in the UN Security Council, as the Russian State does not correspond with standards and requirements of the UN Charter (Article 1, Art. 2 and Art. 4 /p.1/) for membership in this leading international organization.
