Constitutional Court has begun working at a new place in St Petersburg. The first case to be considered at the new location turned out to be that of Manana Aslamazyan. Tens of journalists came to reading. They also wished to see the new residence of the CC. Well, with only 30 employees out of 250 having agreed to move from Moscow to St Petersburg, most offices are still empty and the office work has not been arranged properly yet.   

As for the announced decision, it was met with approval by majority of those present. “Can it be that humanization of justice has really begun, as it was promised by Dmitry Medvedev?” the journalists asked one another. Well, that is not known yet, but the decision on Manana Aslamazyan’s case is to be welcomed: the court chopped down the absurd charges, using the legal arguments.     

Criminal case against Manana Aslamazyan was started in January 2007. Her “guilt” was that she had tried to bring into the country 9.5 thousand Euros without declaration, and the allowed limit for foreign currency is $10,000. Manana explained she had confused Euros with dollars. However, instead of being fined in the administrative way, the brought by her currency was calculated in the Russian rubles and so the size became to be over 250,000 rubles which is considered to be a large scale contraband which might cause an imprisonment sentence up to 5 years.  

Manana Aslamazyan made an appeal to the Constitutional Court indicating that ungrounded prosecution was possible due to uncertainty of some legal norms. The court decided that the Article 188 of the Criminal Code, being combined with the norm defining the large scale of illegally brought amount, does not agree with the Constitution.

The court has established that the fact of bringing currency into the country “is not considered as violation of the state interests”. The violation occurs only in case of exceeding the established limit in really large scale. In the meanwhile, even insignificant exceeding, like it was in Aslamazyan’s case might cause the criminal liability. As a result, there is an opportunity for voluntary application of the legal norm, and it happens the “inaccessible substitute of the administrative norm with the criminal one” which contradicts the constitutional principles of equality and justice.    

The Constitutional Court has noticed that the lawmakers had to formulate the norm in the way where the allowed amount of the brought currency would be excluded from that recognized to be legally allowed without declaration. And now the customs officers consider the whole amount to be unlawfully imported…

Now the civil court’s decisions based on the article recognized to be unconstitutional are to be revisited like Manana Aslamazyan’s case. Her lawyers have already submitted the petition for dismissing the criminal case.