During its Human Rights meeting of 23 – 25 September, the Committee of Ministers ended its supervision of execution of the Strasbourg Court’s judgments of the group Anchugov and Gladkov.
These cases concerned the blanket ban on voting in elections, imposed automatically on all convicted offenders deprived of their liberty in a detention facility, as provided for by the Russian Constitution. The European Court indicated in its 2013 judgment that compliance with the Convention could also be achieved through interpretation of the Constitution to avoid a conflict between itself and the ECHR.
In a ruling of April 2016, the Constitutional Court noted that despite the above constitutional provision, the penal system could be developed so that some freedom-restricting criminal sanctions would not lead automatically to restrictions on voting rights. A law that entered into force in 2017 introduced community work as possible criminal sanction which was applied in approximately 3 000 cases in 2017 – 2018. This law made it possible for these prisoners to vote in federal, regional and municipal elections, thus ending the previous blanket ban.
