Legal issue: whether contested provisions offer an adequate social protection to disabled family members of those judges who died because of the reasons, not relating to the performance of their professional duties?

Ratio decidendi: the restrictive rule of item 7 of Article 20 of the Law of the Russian Federation “On the Status of Judges in the Russian Federation” is an element of legal regulation of compensation of harm caused to the judge and his family members precisely in connection with the judge’s performance of his professional duties, i.e. dispensing justice, and as such does not contradict the Constitution of the Russian Federation. As for the remaining contested provisions, they do not correspond to the Constitution, because they leave a disabled family member, who depended on judge’s support, with only one option of pension scheme – a pension for the loss of breadwinner, regardless of the fact that the amount of this pension does not depend on the judge’s salary and therefore does not allow compensating the income lost because of his death. Thereby, the family members of judges – contrary to the constitutional principles of equality and justice – in respect of their right to pension maintenance are put in a worse position, compared with family members of other persons holding State offices of the Russian Federation, because no special regime for pension maintenance in case of the loss of breadwinner has been provided for the former. 

The Court obligated the federal legislator to establish such special regime in order to guarantee a proper social protection of disabled family members of judges, as being the persons whose status is derivative from the constitutional legal status of the judge.