Constitutional justice and civil society in search of dialogue

Abstract

The Russian constitutional justice is going through a stage of deep reforming. Both the nature of the participation of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation in the constitutional reform of 2020, as well as the content itself and regulatory consequences have exposed a serious value and institutional crisis of the identity of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation in the State-legal system. The main vector of the reform declared in order to “strengthen the role of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation” is essentially resulted from the authoritarian, not humanistic paradigm, and leads to the development of the integration of constitutional justice into a unified system of public power remaining without proper legal deterrence. The noted crisis of the identity of the constitutional justice, which reflects the general problems of Russian constitutionalism, is to a large extent a product and expression of a fundamental communicative constitutional crisis, failures in establishing a constitutional dialogue between the government and civil society. At the same time, constitutional justice is not only the object of this communication with its defects and dysfunctions but should act as one of its main subjects, it has a unique extremely important potential for implementing the values and practices of constitutional dialogue with civil society, especially in the conditions of post-socialism. The constitutional dialogue also characterizes the content side of the constitutional justice itself in its modern understanding. In this context, the article discusses both general issues related to the understanding of constitutional dialogue itself and its importance for constitutional justice, as well as some more specific problems of implementing the dialogic model of constitutional-judicial control in Russian realities. Determining the direction of the further evolution of the constitutional justice, which has a unique potential for self-transformation, in any case, is an important area of responsibility of civil society, which itself must remain resolute in organizing the constitutional dialogue, not avoid attempts to initiate it and insist on it.