Recommendations on the modernization of constitutional legislation in the field of protecting spiritual and moral values

Abstract

The 2020 constitutional reform and the strategic-planning instruments adopted in its wake established traditional spiritual and moral values as a constitutionally protected good, yet the mechanism of their protection remains dispersed across norms of different levels and branches, lacking a single system-forming link. The gap between the value-laden text of the Constitution and the fragmentary sectoral implementation generates interpretive collisions and weakens the regulatory potential of the relevant provisions. The aim is to identify directions for modernizing constitutional legislation that ensure a transition from a declarative entrenchment of values to a functioning system of their legal protection. The study relies on formal-legal and comparative-legal methods, systemic and teleological interpretation of constitutional norms, and legal modelling of the proposed constructions. It is established that the constitutionalization of values has been realized mainly through goal-norms and principle-norms (Articles 67.1, 72, 75.1, 114 of the Constitution), whereas a federal law specifying them is absent, and the Foundations of state policy, approved by a presidential decree, do not possess the force of law. A zone of tension is recorded between the value certainty of the Foundations and the principle of ideological diversity (Article 13, part 2), resolved through interpretation rather than through the priority of one norm. The expediency of a framework federal law fixing the list, definitions and distribution of powers for the protection of values is substantiated, alongside an orienting role of the Constitutional Court in their interpretation. Turning the value block of the Constitution into a system of directly operating guarantees is achieved not by expanding declarative formulas but by embedding values into competence and procedural norms that give them enforceable tangibility.