?
Human (Personal) Dignity as an Argumentation Tool of the Russian Constitutional Court
Paragraph 1 of Article 21 of the Russian Federation (the RF) Constitution sets out that human dignity shall be protected by the state, and nothing may serve as a basis for its derogation. Historically, this formulation of human dignity was informed by the German principle of Menschenwürde, which suggested that a human being is “not that of an isolated, sovereign individual,” but rather that of an individual embedded in society and subject to societal limitations. In the views of the 1993 Constitution’s authors, human dignity should have played a similar role in Russian legal order—serving as the basis for other human rights. Theoretically, this principle is coextensive with similar constitutional principles developed in the post-war Western legal tradition. However, the normative implications of this statement in Russian constitutional law are quite different from the liberal approaches generally accepted in Western jurisdictions.