An immoral reading of international norms has been banished from Russian family law

Last updated on February 5th, 2021 at 11:34 am

Since last year, Russian parliamentarians have been actively amending the laws to implement the new provisions of the Constitution of the Russian Federation approved last year.

The new wording of Article 79 of the Russian Constitution was intended to protect the sovereignty of the country. The Constitution now establishes, “Decisions of intergovernmental bodies based on provisions of international treaties of the Russian Federation in their interpretation contradicting the Constitution of the Russian Federation shall not be subject to execution in the Russian Federation.”

This provision of the amended Constitution has now been given concrete expression in family law. At the end of January, legislators approved a bill on amendments to the Family Code of the Russian Federation proposed by the President.

Previously, Article 6 of the Family Code had established the unconditional priority of international law over Russian family law. Things are a little different now. A new paragraph has been added to this article, which reads:

“The application of the rules of international treaties in their interpretation contradicting the Constitution of the Russian Federation, as well as the fundamentals of legal order and morality, shall not be permitted. Such a contradiction may be established in accordance with the procedure determined by federal constitutional law.”

The importance of this norm can hardly be overestimated. After all, international law, which once protected the family and morality, today often becomes a serious threat to them.

This is because intergovernmental bodies interpreting international treaties affecting the family – one may recall the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg and the UN Committees on the Rights of the Child and on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women – have come under the strongest influence of supporters of radical anti-family ideologies and have engaged in arbitrary political activism instead of protecting human rights.

The result of such ideological usurpation is a situation where these bodies arbitrarily, at their own pleasure, interpret international norms, creating new non-existent “human rights” and “obligations” of States simply “out of thin air”. And it’s happening more and more often and going farther and farther all the time.

In place of genuine human rights, which were once recognized by all or almost all nations, we are all offered abortions, same-sex unions, gender ideology, radical feminism and the destruction of parental rights. In other words, the destruction of everything that is associated with the pillar of any society – the family.

Of course, such interpretations not resulting from the treaties themselves are illegitimate and should not be applied in practice. But radical activists are exerting serious pressure on various countries, relying on decisions of once authoritative international structures and forcing peoples all over the world to abandon the natural family and other their (and all humanity’s) traditional values.

One notable example is the 2015 decision of the European Court of Human Rights in the case of Oliari v. Italy. Therein, the Strasbourg judges created ex nihilo an entirely new “human right” – the legal recognition of same-sex unions. And now, according to the Court’s position, all state parties to the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (including Russia!) are obliged to provide such recognition – or will be considered violators of “human rights”.

This, of course, is blatantly absurd. And it might surprise us if we did not know that today the European Court of Human Rights finds itself in the shadow of George Soros – at least 22 of the judges who decide cases in this Court have links to the Soros network of Open Society Foundations and other organizations funded by this man.

The trouble is that their interpretations, according to the convention itself, are considered binding on all participating States. And although they are completely illegitimate, as they go beyond the Strasbourg Court’s authority, they could easily be used to put political pressure on Russia and other countries. But now, after the amendments to the Russian Constitution and the Family Code, it will be much more difficult for the proponents of radical ideologies to remake Russian society by imposing their immoral new “values” on it.