TOPICAL PROBLEMS RELATED TO LEGAL EFFECT OF DECISION OF THE CONSTITUTIONAL COURT OF GEORGIA

Abstract

Objective criteria of the effectiveness of the Constitutional Court are its decisions, which reflect real purpose and practical significance of the Court.

While interpreting constitutional norms the Constitutional Court creates a living constitution. Hence, it is vital that the Court ensures effective operation of the country’s basic law through comprehensive knowledge of constitutional values and the use of these values as a foundation for its reasoning. When dealing with fundamental rights of an individual, the Court should ground its interpretations on the full understanding of the scope and content of each right in order to ensure that the practical content of the right interpreted be wholly adequate with the constitutional weight of the given right. Eventually, decisions of the Constitutional Court should support development of law. Whether the decisions satisfy these criteria, and how effective and fair is the Court, the answers to these questions are provided in the decisions. Though binding, the decisions of the Constitutional Court are open for public debate and assessments. In addition, the decisions are the right criteria for self-assessment of the Court (and for the judges). Therefore, to what extent the Court can develop itself depends on its objective and self-critical attitude towards its own decisions.

Clearly, the content of the decisions is essential for the aims of the Court to be realized in the first place. At the same time, it is of no less importance that legal guarantees of the Court’s decisions be rightly understood and formulated in order to make legal consequences of these decisions and the Court’s activity more accessible. There are several challenging issues related to the legal effects of the Constitutional Court’s decisions. We will try to examine some of them in the present article.