Procedures for Challenging Regulations in the Russian Legislation: from Civil Procedural Code to Administrative Procedural Code
The article presents an analysis of the most important provisions of recently adopted Russian Administrative Procedural Code (APC) dealing with the cases of challenging regulations. In particular, the author addresses issues as: application requirements, the period during which the applicants can take legal recourse; legal implications of the situation when the regulation got invalidated while being challenged; the strategies of procedural judicial procedures if the request for challenging a regulation was not satisfied; specific features of handling cases involving challenging regulations; the moment when the challenged regulation has been found in contradiction with an overriding legal act and by virtue of this invalidated; the prohibition to apply regulations that possess a less significant legal effect and overlap the content of an overriding act that was completely or partially repealed. The author compares the current legislative framework with the earlier norms of the Russian Civil Procedural Code that envisages procedures for complete or partial repeal of regulatory legal acts. The article presents the author's assessment of the new provisions of the Russian APC which address the procedures for challenging regulations, including measures of provisional remedy, merger of cases, prohibition of amicable agreements in cases with challenging regulations, and using summary of written proceedings in the cases involving the challenge of regulations. Apart of it, the article displays several drawbacks of legal writings and mechanics, discovers contradictions in certain parts of the Administrative Procedural Code and brings up occasional parallels between some APC norms and constitutional proceedings