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WE FELL BEHIND OF CIVILIZED WORLD

Politics

«The necessity of the CC appears in case of adopting a Constitution, which would have immediate power of action. Moreover, it is essential to provide the domination of all the constitutional norms over the rest of normative acts”, specialist of the constitutional right Vardan Poghosyan says.

There are Austrian and American models of control over the centralized norms of the CC. According to the US model, the constitutional control is accomplished by all types of courts. In the United States each judge is obliged to check whether the legal act corresponds to the Constitution. The Austrian model of the CC may for the first time applied in Austria in 1920 its author being Hans Kenzer. It was spread after the World War II. According the German Constitution the CC was empowered with all the classic authorities. After that in 1989 the idea of the CC received recognition in the Eastern Europe. The exception was Estonia, which has formed a special chamber for constitutional control within the Supreme Court. In Britain such a problem did not exist as there are no acts above the bills adopted by the House of Commons. There is no classic CC in France. There is a Constitutional Council and citizens have no right to appeal to it. This body controls the correspondence of the constitutional laws before they come into force.

The Constitutional Courts exercise a number of classic authorities the principal one being the control over the norms, that is the solution of questions in accord with the Constitution. In almost of the states of Eastern Europe if a judge of any king of court sees variance with the Constitution he has the right to appeal to the CC for final resolution

Unfortunately the RA Constitution does not provide for such a possibility and I am glad to note that this norm is fixed in the coalition and ULP's drafts», Poghosyan noted. In his words one of the major faults of the acting Constitution is the limited number of individuals who exercise he right to appeal to the CC. «In this view our Constitution falls behind of the international development. Almost in all the states the government enjoys equal with the President's right to appeal to the CC», Vardan Poghosyan noted.

The biggest shot-coming referring to the CC authority, in Poghosyan's opinion is the absence of individual complaint. Each person whose constitutional right was infringed should have the right to appeal to the CC. To note, in Russia the institute of constitutional complaint was adopted in 1993. The most important question is whether a citizen has the right to appeal to the CC to contest the illegal decisions made by the courts. “The coalition’s draft provides for the possibility of constitutional complaint only on the issues of correspondence to the Constitution. The ULP’s draft is more progressive. According to it, every person has the right to contest any normative act in the CC”, he resumed.

Victoria Abrahamyan