Citizens’ Appeals to the President of the Russian Federation during Direct Line Broadcasts: Constitutional and Legal Nature and Problems of Legal Regulation

The paper identifies a doctrinal and law enforcement gap arising from the fact that citizens’ appeals submitted during the annual live call‑in session with the President of the Russian Federation, while constituting a form of exercising the constitutional right guaranteed by Article 33 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation, do not fully fall within the scope of the Federal Law «On the Procedure for Considering Appeals from Citizens of the Russian Federation». Based on an analysis of the legal characteristics of citizen appeals and relevant scholarly literature, the paper substantiates the thesis that such appeals possess a distinct legal nature. It is argued that the specific features of their form (oral, public, and conducted in real time), the status of the addressee (the head of state acting as guarantor of the Constitution), and the procedure governing their consideration preclude the application of statutorily established procedural rules, while not diminishing their constitutional and legal significance. The article concludes that this phenomenon requires doctrinal recognition as a distinct public‑law mechanism of direct democracy and governmental feedback, necessitating either an expansion of the scope of the aforementioned federal law to account for its specific characteristics or the recognition of such appeals as an independent institution of constitutional law.

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