Authors

Dmitry Kurnosov¹;  ¹ University of Helsinki, Finland

Discussion

My presentation will approach the nearly twenty five years of Russian membership in the European Convention on Human Rights from the perspective of actors that often undermined the said membership. These actors are Russian state institutions such as the federal legislature, the Constitutional Court, the other apex courts, the Ministry of Justice and the Prosecutor’s General Office. In the waning years of Russian membership, many of these institutions actively worked to challenge the legitimacy of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) and its jurisprudence. Yet, it was not always like that. For a long time institutions were willing to provide partial compliance with the ECtHR judgments. I argue that they saw the Strasbourg Court jurisprudence as a procedural tool to improve the overall quality of governance. In this way, the institutions acted as norm entrepreneurs to bolster their own standing vis-a-vis their counterparts. At the same time, from the very beginning there was little institutional support for ‘mega-political’ judgments. With the marked conservative turn in the early 2010s, the sphere of ‘mega-political’ was extended to encompass a whole host of social and cultural issues. The logic of norm-entrepreneurs now encouraged them to challenge the ECtHR, producing both legislative change and a change in tone. These changes curtailed the impact of Strasbourg jurisprudence on Russian law already before the country's exit from the Convention.