General provisions

Based on the principles of people’s sovereignty, separation of powers, supremacy of law the Constitution of the Republic of Belarus proclaims the wide list of personal, political, socio-economic and cultural rights of citizens, stipulates the mechanisms of their legal protection. One of such mechanisms in the Republic of Belarus is the constitutional justice which is secured by the activity of the Constitutional Court.

The institute of the constitutional justice is widely known in the world practice of state building. At present it exists in absolute majority of democratic states. The constitutional control is necessary to consider as one of the most effective reflections of the system of checks and balances in the mechanism of safeguarding of the separation of powers.

Created in 1994 the Constitutional Court is a specialized body of the constitutional control and it is the part of the judicial system of the Republic of Belarus. The tasks of the Constitutional Court are securing the supremacy of the Constitution and its direct application on the territory of the state, conformity of normative legal acts of state bodies to the Constitution, strengthening legality in rule-making and law-enforcement.

From the moment of its foundation the Constitutional Court has delivered more than 500 decisions concerned various aspects of functioning of the legal system of the Republic of Belarus. Decisions of the Constitutional Court have become the valuable source of Belarusian law. Legal positions of the Constitutional Court which are formulated in its decisions are the basis for perfection of legislation and the practice of its application, contain doctrinal provisions of conceptual character. As a result of the activity of the Constitutional Court the development of the sphere of constitutional rights and freedoms has received an additional impulse.

In the Republic of Belarus the constitutional control develops, not just using the political and legal experience of Belarus, but also actively perceiving European humanitarian tradition. The intensification of the constitutional control in Belarus is going on the way of combination of preliminary (preventive review) and subsequent forms (ex post facto review) of constitutional control.