Status of international agreements in the Russian constitutional law

International agreements are an important element stabilizing the international law and Russia’s relations with other countries. Bordering with 14 countries and being a politically active member of several dozen international organizations, Russia is a party to the vast number of contracts and international agreements concluded between countries as well as international organizations. In April 1986, the Soviet Union ratified the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties of 22 May 1969. After the changes in the political system, the Russian Federation as the successor to the Soviet Union defined the status of international agreements in the Constitution of 12 December 1993 in the Federal Law of 15 July 1995 on the international treaties of the Russian Federation and the Federal Constitutional Law on the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation. The purpose of this article is to present the status of international agreements of the Russian Federation, in particular the primacy of international law over national laws – in the light of Federal Constitutional Law, case law and the doctrine, including latest changes in the Law on the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation of December 2015.

The Issue of Supplementing the Ratification Act with Additional Content (art. 89 of the Polish Constitution)

The authors point to arguments of legal interpretation of the Constitution that would justify the possibility of including additional provisions in the statute agreeing to ratify the international agreement (Article 89(1) of the Polish Constitution). A condition for such an extension would be the direct link between the additional content and the implementation of the international agreement and the possibility of adopting additional content in the ordinary legislative procedure. Such provisions could not violate the provisions of the Polish Constitution. The authors also point to non-legal arguments that could justify such action by the legislature in a particular situation. However, they favour the uniqueness of such a solution and its embedding in a specific systemic context.

Place of International Law in the Legal System of Ukraine

An important factor in shaping the legal system of an independent democratic state is to define the place of its international obligations in the domestic legal system. International law binds states that are bound by its norms governing their cooperation within the international community. Therefore, it is necessary to refer to the problem of the relation of international law to internal law by analyzing the regulations of the Ukrainian legislation and the international conventions concluded by it. The subject of the analysis are the provisions of the Constitution of Ukraine of 1996 and the Act on International Agreements of 2004 as well as the provisions of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties of 1969, to which the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic acceded in 1986 and to which Ukraine is now a party.