Translated material
Senate Duma
Dmitry Medvedev launched the procedure for reformatting the Federation Council
A bill on a new procedure for forming the Federation Council was submitted to the State Duma yesterday by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. On December 5, in his first presidential address to the Federal Assembly, he first noted the need to change the system of appointing senators. The amendments to the current law proposed by the head of state determine that only deputies of regional legislative assemblies or municipal representative bodies of government of the federal subject from which the senator is elected will be able to apply for a seat in the upper house of parliament.Let us recall that now each subject of the federation delegates two representatives to the Federation Council - from the local parliament and from the regional administration. Both candidates are undergoing the approval procedure in the regional legislative assembly.
The presidential bill also envisages the abolition of the norm on the residency requirement. This norm requires a candidate for senator to live in the region that he will represent in the Federation Council for at least ten years after his majority. At the moment, exceptions to this rule are provided only for former military personnel and prosecutors.
Speaking in his presidential address about the need to reform the procedure for forming the upper chamber, Dmitry Medvedev noted that under the new system, the Federation Council will include “citizens who have gone through the public election procedure, have experience working with voters and represent not only the authorities of the subject of the federation, but the very the main thing is its population itself.” Some analysts considered this a kind of compromise: in recent years, proposals have been made more than once to introduce direct popular elections of senators. In particular, this idea was repeatedly voiced by the speaker of the upper house, Sergei Mironov. In the scheme proposed by the president, senators, on the one hand, go through an election procedure, and on the other, an appointment procedure, so that regional authorities have ample opportunities to introduce the necessary candidates to Moscow.
At the same time, the bill submitted to the State Duma yesterday does not contain any restrictions on the number of municipalities from whose representative bodies the regional authorities can call future senators. Earlier, the Speaker of the State Duma, the leader of United Russia, Boris Gryzlov, proposed establishing a kind of qualification: to nominate to the Federation Council only those local-level parliamentarians who have passed through elections in municipalities with a population of at least several thousand people. However, Dmitry Medvedev did not listen to these proposals. Nevertheless, Mr. Gryzlov, speaking yesterday about his proposals, said that they could be considered “in preparation for the second reading.”
If the presidential amendments are adopted without changes, regional authorities will have the legal opportunity to appoint to the upper house of the Russian parliament any person elected as a deputy at least in a rural settlement. The task is made easier by the fact that after the adoption of Law 131 “On the General Principles of the Organization of Local Self-Government”, the total number of municipalities in the country increased from 5 to 24 thousand, and most of the newly formed 19 thousand municipalities are rural settlements with a small population -- 1000, 100, even 50 people. According to experts, putting the desired candidate through the “popular vote” procedure under these conditions is simple and inexpensive.
The first reading of the bill introduced by Mr. Medvedev is scheduled in the State Duma for December 24, as announced yesterday by the chairman of the State Duma Committee on Constitutional Legislation and State Building, Vladimir Pligin. If adopted, the law will come into force on January 1, 2011.