OREANDA-NEWS  The new rules, which complicated the procedure for applying to the Constitutional Court (CC), did not affect the number of complaints to the highest court: after the recession in 2021, the statistics of appeals went up again, according to data published on the court's website. However, experts believe that it is too early to talk about "import substitution" by the Constitutional Court of the functions previously performed by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR): and little time has passed, and their jurisdictions are still different.

Over the past year, the number of appeals to the Constitutional Court has increased by almost 10%, according to statistics published on the court's website. In total, in 2022, the court received 12,933 appeals — a little more than a thousand more than a year earlier. By the way, by the end of 2021, a record decrease in the number of complaints received by the COP was recorded, which generally reflects the general trend: the highest figure was recorded in 2009 (20,629 complaints), and since then their number has been constantly decreasing. In addition, in 2021, new rules established at the end of 2020 by amendments to the Law on the Constitutional Court began to work: an additional condition for the admissibility of a complaint about a violation of constitutional rights and freedoms was the exhaustion of all other domestic remedies.

However, last year a trend reversal was recorded, which surprised, it seems, even the chairman of the Constitutional Court Valery Zorkin — he himself admitted this at a meeting with the president in December 2022. "What is surprising, Vladimir Vladimirovich," Mr. Zorkin said at the time, "we have had a significant change after amendments were made to the Constitution and the federal constitutional law. They made it so that you can apply to the Constitutional Court only when a citizen has passed all the instances, that is, the Supreme Court... So I want to say that the number of complaints has not decreased, despite the fact that, it would seem, everyone said that access was difficult."

As follows from the published statistics, most of all citizens were concerned about issues of criminal law and procedure — they account for 4,494 appeals, that is, more than a third of the total number.

In second place are issues affecting the constitutional status of the individual, including personal and political rights (here citizens were most concerned about the right to judicial protection and social protection issues). The least Russians cared about issues of international law — there were only 14 appeals on this occasion.