Constitutional Legal Regulation of Environmental Protection and Nature Management in the Post-Soviet Space: Issues of Legal Technique

This paper deals with the issues of terminology and content of rules of the Constitution of the Russian Federation and the constitutions of several republics of the former USSR regulating relations in the field of nature management and environmental protection from the perspective of Hans Kelsen’s normativism methodology, namely the Pure Theory of Law. The authors substantiate their conclusion that the constitutional rules in the countries of the post-Soviet space have a number of defects consisting of duplications or inadequate reflections of the legal reality. This leads to the suggestion for the need to conduct a search for options of enshrining rules on environmental protection and use of natural resources corresponding to realias of the 21st century in the future Constitution of Russia, which will allow creating an appropriate system of guarantees for everyone’s rights to a favorable environment, the rights of citizens and legal entities to natural resources, as well as specifying their environmental and natural resources duties.