Resisting Strasbourg to Reassure Moscow: the Recent Story of the Russian Constitutional Court

Abstract

Russia’s last decade within the European Convention on Human Rights (up to its exit in 2022) was seen by many authors as an emblematic case of state-led resistance to the authority of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg that interprets the Convention. However, they mostly view it from a Strasbourg perspective. This article fills a gap in the literature by adding a perspective of a Russian institution – the country’s Constitutional Court. It argues that it had to walk a fine line by addressing two distinct constituencies – the other state institutions and human rights lawyers. By analysing the case citation patterns, the article claims that the Constitutional Court in practice balanced its public criticism of Strasbourg colleagues by accepting the authority of their judgments.