The Role of the Russian Constitutional Court in «Constitutionalizing» Procedural Legislation (on the Example of the Principle of Adversarial Proceedings and Equality of the Parties)

Using the example of the principle of adversarial proceedings and equality of the parties, the author discusses the Russian Constitutional Court’s activities on the non-textual development of provisions of the Constitution of the Russian Federation. The author analyzes the constitutional law-making tools of the Court and the mechanism of its influence on legal rules at the constitutional level, and finds that the norms of the Russian Constitution have a huge regulatory potential, but are not able to express the will of the constitutional legislator in relation to each specific situation. In turn, the legal positions of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation are an instrument of a more subtle (substantive, targeted, dynamic) constitutional and legal impact. They reveal the semantic values of the norms of the Basic Law, summing up the constitutional legal basis under the provisions checked for compliance with the Constitution of the Russian Federation. The author concludes that the norms of the Basic Law taken in unity with the legal positions of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation provide the necessary regulatory effect and form an integrative constitutional and legal regulator at the meta level.