Legal issue: the сonstitutionality of rules which envisage for citizens who were sentenced to deprivation of liberty for the committal of grave and particularly grave crimes (including the crimes committed before the contested rules were enacted) the life-long and unconditional deprivation of the right to be elected, regardless of the cancellation or expunging of their  record of conviction, and also regardless of whether such person has received a probationary sentence.

Ratio decidendi: the contested rules have been deemed by the Court to be partially non-conformant to the Constitution. The Constitution does not exclude the possibility of restricting the passive electoral right by a federal law with respect to certain categories of persons who have served their sentence in the form of deprivation of liberty.  To be stable, the rule-of-law democracy needs efficient legal mechanisms capable of safeguarding it against abuses and criminalization of public authorities, whose legitimacy to a great extent is based on their having the confidence of the society. The federal legislator may establish higher reputational requirements for persons holding public offices - such that citizens would not have doubts as to their moral qualities and, respectively, the lawfulness and unselfishness of their behaviour - by using for these purposes certain restrictions on passive electoral rights.   

In accordance of the case law of the European Court of Human Rights, the right to be elected may, in principle, be restricted more severely than the right to elect; the proportionality of its restriction with regard to convicted persons is guaranteed by its differentiation in accordance with the character and category of crime and of the punishment and, particularly and most importantly, by an individualised (non-automatic) application, that is with due regard to the circumstances of specific case and the personality of the convicted one; an automatic and undifferentiated deprivation of  a group of persons of its electoral rights, irrespective of the term of punishment, of the nature and gravity of the offence committed and of personal circumstances is incompatible with Article 3 of Protocol 1 of the European Convention on Human Rights.  Therefore, a restriction by a federal law of passive electoral right without any time limits may not be justified solely by the fact of previous conviction. According to the sense of Article 32 (part 3) of the Constitution, such prohibition is admissible only in the case of life-long imprisonment.

The Court rules that the terms of restrictions of passive electoral right related to conviction should be established in accordance with the differentiation of the terms for expiration of conviction record, as provided for by the Criminal Code. In exceptional cases for some grave and particularly grave crimes, proceeding from the high degree of their danger for society, a more extended terms of restrictions may be introduced by a federal law, but observing the criteria of proportionality and necessity.

The federal legislator is prescribed to make corresponding amendments in the legislation.