Kononov, the constitutional judge who criticised Chechnya's special laws, has died

He died at 75 years of age and was one of the most influential figures in the Russian judiciary. He was remembered for his battle against the return to the Soviet regime. He was co-signer of the law on the victims of political repressions in the 1990s. A personality in clear opposition to Putin. 

Moscow (AsiaNews) - One week ago, mid-August, Anatoly Kononov, a retired constitutional judge, who for many years represented the "resistance of law" to attempts to restore various forms of dictatorship in Russia, so much so as to be called a "knight of legal dissent", passed away in Moscow at the age of 75. Many have remembered him, in the face of the obvious defeat of his epic struggle, which has, however, left an inexhaustible source of energy in many people who refuse to accept a return to Soviet times.

Kononov was the author, together with Sergei Kovalev and Arsenij Roginskij, of the famous law on victims of political repression in the 1990s. This law was in fact the only real attempt to purify memory after seventy years of oppression, condemning the Soviet regime as 'guilty of mass persecution of its own people'. In the sessions of the Constitutional Court he had his 'particular opinions' recorded in opposition to the attempts to curtail the rights and freedoms of citizens, always stating that he was not interested in 'the balance between private and public interests', the motivation for every law in favour of the regime in power, but in the defence of the rights of the individual.

He was in fact a 'white fly' (Russian for 'white crow', belaja vorona), and his fellow magistrates constantly reproached him: 'You are not a judge, but a humanitarian activist', because he did not put the interests of the state first. The president of the Court, Valerij Zorkin, told him that 'it is time to mature, you defend criminals and oligarchs, stop playing with these rights of individuals', and now one can better understand how radical this opposition was, in the face of the 'great war against liberalism' announced by Vladimir Putin and Patriarch Kirill.

He himself explained the reasons for his dissent from his colleagues, who interpreted law with positivist criteria, as 'the set of laws in force', while he adhered to the conception of natural law, as 'the set of principles of freedom, equality and justice'. If laws are the existing laws, since they are approved by the state, it means for the positivists that people's rights must also be decided by the state, while Kononov asserted that it is precisely the Constitutional Court that must illuminate the laws with the fundamental principles of human existence, the last bastion before giving in to state arbitrariness or turning to the international courts, which are also sources of ambiguous evaluations.

His official opinion against the reasons for the dissolution of the PCI, the Soviet Communist Party, which were based on general arguments without giving an assessment of the party's activities, also remained famous. This could have 'provoked sectarian interpretations of the role of the party, without giving guarantees to avoid its reconstitution'. In fact, in 1996 the party was reborn as the Kprf, proposing the first regime restoration against Yeltsyn and paving the way for Putin's 'United Russia' while Kononov, as jurist Nikolai Bobrinsky recalls, had set the goal of 'guaranteeing the non-repetition' of state totalitarianism.

The rights defender also opposed Yeltsyn's 'Chechen decrees', which in the late 1990s granted the government unlimited powers over the military and civilians, powers that were handed over into Putin's hands in 1999. Again, his 'particular opinion' insisted that 'the transformation of a subject into the object of compulsory measures, even if ethically motivated, goes against the untouchable foundation of his rights: the dignity of the person'. He made many interventions in this regard, later collected in the book Osoboe mnenie ('Special Opinion'), until he was forced to leave his post at the Constitutional Court prematurely in 2009. Even then his farewell was considered by many to be 'the ruin of justice in Russia', and now the consequences can be seen in the catastrophic ruins of the state war.