This article is part of the project “Sociology of the Transnational Constitution”, carried out at the University of Manchester under the supervision of Professor Christopher Thornhill. This project is a comparative study of the legislation, case law, social phenomena with the aim to determine the effect of international law in the ongoing process of constitution-building in various countries and, particularly, in Russia. Extensive empirical data collected during the course of the project, results in the formulation of the following three main hypotheses that are discussed in the paper. First, legal accountability of the state to the citizens in Russia is asymmetrically high in comparison with political accountability. Second, there is a clear understanding in Russia that the successful state building depends on the efficiency of the judiciary; to a certain extent, the judiciary becomes the subject, or the main driver of constitutional reforms rather than being their object. Third, targeted and strategic use of international law plays a key role in all elements of the process of secondary constitutionalization, that is, not only in implementation of the constitutional guarantee of human rights protection, but also in the construction of the necessary institutions.
secondary constitutionalization, international law and the Russian legal system, international law and domestic legal systems, state-building, court system, the judiciary, legal accountability, political accountability.
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