Press Release, 26.10.2022

Today, the Moscow City Duma amended the law “On the status of a deputy of the Moscow City Duma” by a majority vote of pro-government MPs. According to the amendments, a deputy can be deprived of his/her mandate for violations of anti-corruption legislation by a decision of the majority in the Moscow City Duma. The bill was adopted by the Moscow City Duma within the framework of the draft law “On the General Principles of Organising Public Authority in the Subjects of the Russian Federation”, prepared by Senator Andrei Klishas and State Duma Deputy Pavel Krasheninnikov and destroying local self-government. The Yabloko faction voted against the bill.

Maxim Kruglov, head of the Yabloko faction in the Moscow City Duma, opposed the amendments, noting that they were not related to the fight against corruption, but were a powerful political tool.

“The draft law proposed by Klishas and Krasheninnikov is a political law about the destruction of the system of local self-government and the principles of federalism. All the tools for anti-corruption control over deputies do exist already: these are investigative actions, law enforcement norms and courts decisions. The process of fighting corruption must be depoliticised. These amendments politicise it, because they transfer the issues of evaluating the actions of deputies to the [pro-government] majority of deputies, that is, the party in power. A mechanism is being created when the political majority gets the opportunity to crack down on the opposition,” Maxim Kruglov said.

Moscow City Duma deputy Sergei Mitrokhin also noted that these amendments contradict the Russian Constitution. The contradiction lies in the fact that, according to regulatory documents, the general principles of legislation are under the federal jurisdiction, since federalism implies the “freedom of hands” of the subject of the Russian Federation. “That is, a general framework is set, and regional legislators have the right to choose. But now we are being offered a detailed procedure,” Sergei Mitrokhin commented.

Mitrokhin also stressed that an encroachment on the principle of separation of powers represented another fundamental violation of the Constitution. He said that the bill by Klishas and Krasheninnikov had been originally conceived as “reprisal against independent deputies and, perhaps, even entire factions”.

The bill not only outlines the procedure for depriving deputies of their mandates, but also adds new categories of information that MPs need to indicate in their declarations. Now the MPs will have to report on the sources of funds spent on buying “digital financial assets and digital currency”.

Many deputies of the Moscow City Duma spoke out against the bill, but the majority of votes of the government’s United Russia faction and the deputies’ association My Moscow approved the amendments to the law “On the status of a deputy of the Moscow City Duma”.