Legal issue: whether the contested regulation is constitutional, given that it served as a ground for the exclusion of a deputy of legislative (representative) body of State power of a constituent entity of the Russian Federation from a party group in the regional parliament and for the pre-term termination of his powers is case of his leaving the political party on whose list of candidates he had been elected and whose group in parliament he is a member of?

Ratio decidendi: the Court refused to deem the contested rules to be contradictory to the Constitution, but it gave them a binding interpretation, according to which they do not allow the exclusion of the candidate from the group and pre-term termination of his powers for the reason of his leaving the political party, on whose list he had been elected to parliament. Any other regulation would not be in conformity with the independence of the deputy and the principle of free mandate. Within the current legislative framework a balance between the principle of people’s sovereignty and the principle of the deputy’s independence is achieved by combination of permitting the deputy to leave the political party with the simultaneous prohibition to join another party group and another political party. The aim of this regulation is to prevent the attempts to undermine the opposition through encouraging its members to change sides by joining the party having a majority in the legislative body, thus changing the post-election factional proportions and, consequently, the balance of political forces within the legislative body. The deputy may be stripped of his mandate only for his leaving his party group in the legislature, and not the respective party.  Moreover, the party group itself may not exclude him from its ranks and unseat him on this ground, because leaving a party group may happen on a voluntary basis only.