Boytsov Alexander

Judge of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation.

BOYTSOV, Alexander Ilyich (b. 1950) upon graduating from the Borovichi Industrial College, he served in the Strategic Missile Forces. In 1978 he graduated from the Law Faculty of Leningrad State University. In 1981, he defended his Kandidat thesis, and in 1996, his doctoral dissertation. Since 1981, he worked at the Department of Criminal Law of the Faculty of Law of St. Petersburg (Leningrad) State University as an assistant, then assistant professor, and since 1996, as a professor. He was a member of the working group that prepared the Model Criminal Code for the CIS countries. He served as deputy chairman of the Commission on Pardon in St. Petersburg. At a plenary session of the Federation Council on July 14, 2010, Alexander Boytsov was appointed judge of the Constitutional Court of Russia on the proposal of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.

Complicity in the constitutional coup.

Alexander Boytsov belongs to the St. Petersburg cohort of the judges of the Constitutional Court, which is considered to be the most loyal to the Kremlin. Boytsov himself studied at the Faculty of Law of the Leningrad State University at the same time as Vladimir Putin and later was a supervisor and colleague of Dmitry Medvedev in the Faculty of Law, who nominated him to the Constitutional Court.

In 2014, Boytsov participated in the formalization of the illegal annexation of Crimea, and was one of the co-authors of the decision of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation of March 19, 2014 #6-P on the recognition of “the international treaty between the Russian Federation and the Republic of Crimea on the accession of the Republic of Crimea in the Russian Federation and the formation of new entities in accordance with the Constitution of the Russian Federation in the composition of the Russian Federation.”

In 2020, during the hasty passing of Putin's amendments to the Basic Law, the Constitutional Court acted as the legalizer of the coup. On March 10, United Russia MP Valentina Tereshkova proposed lifting restrictions on the number of presidential terms or allowing re-election of Vladimir Putin to the presidency (“nullifying” the number of terms already held by him as president). Putin, who suddenly appeared at a meeting of the Duma, supported Tereshkova’s statement but referred to the need to obtain a Constitutional Court opinion on the conformity of the amendments to the current Constitution. Already after two days of consideration, the Constitutional Court almost wholly recognized the legality of “nullifying,” although in 1998, considering a similar case, it had forbidden President Yeltsin to run for the third time in a row. It is noteworthy that the judges explained the new decision by the “special clause” included in the Basic Law which had been absent earlier, which takes into account certain “historical factors <...>, including the degree of threats to the state and society, the state of the political and economic systems.” According to many experts and analysts, allowing Putin to remain president after 2024 was the main goal of the whole venture with the amendments.

As early as March 14, 2020, Putin signed hastily drafted amendments. Besides “nullifying the terms,” they allow the Russian authorities to ignore the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights, introduce the concept of “internal threats” that the Security Council of the Russian Federation must fight, and also expand the powers of the president. They completed the constitutional and legal drafting of Putin's dictatorship and are regarded by the Free Russia Forum as an illegitimate and anti-democratic constitutional coup.