Does tail wag the dog? Response to the article of I. Grigoriev "Role of the Russian Constitutional Court Secretariat: Filtration or Shock-absorption?"

Abstract

The present paper is a polemical response to the article of I. Grigoriev on participation of the Secretariat of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation in a course of preliminary consideration of complaints, published in «Sociology of Power» Journal, number 2, year 2015. In the present paper, the author criticizes the proposition of I. Grigoriev about such a function of the Secretariat, as «damping», and argues for a performance of «filtering» function (as well as, to a lesser extent, «mobilization» function). The author, in particular, comes to the conclusion that the named Secretariat cannot and does not aim to «protect» the judges from the appeals, which have expressed politically motivation, and also from complaints, indicating the ignorance of the Constitutional Court decisions. In fact, this governmental body is designed to protect them from all sorts of claims, which do not comply - in their form and content - even with minimum requirements of the Law, including cases of abuse of the right to appeal. We demonstrate, that this thesis is - contrary to the assumption of I. Grigoriev - is equally valid for so-called «Moscow» and «St. Petersburg» periods of the Court's activity. Nevertheless, the author does not exclude, that some aspects of how the Court's unit works as a whole, and how it interacts with the judges, can be subject to improvement over time.