The Constitutional Principle of Equality as a Complex Concept: Problems of the Addressee and the Degree of Implementation

The Constitution of the Russian Federation uses concepts that are different from the legal point of view, namely: «equality before the law» and «equality of rights» The first term means equal treatment by the law, but not equal rights and obligations. And only in this case, the word «all» used in Art. 19 may have a valid meaning: a citizen, a legal entity, a constituent entity of the Russian Federation, and the State itself are equal since they are equal regarding legal norms applied to them, which, of course, will contain various prescriptions in relation to these subjects. Today, the issue of recognizing and protecting so-called group rights is very relevant. The rights of the second generation — socio-economic rights — are largely related to the actual conditions for their implementation: if personal rights are based on the idea of formal equality, then for this group of rights equality presupposes «affirmative actions» of the State aimed at equalizing the actual conditions of legal use. In this regard, the problem of opposition to formal and actual equality arises: actual equality is usually considered as opposition to formal equality. Meanwhile, if we switch to the language of strict terminology, then actual equality does not mean at all equality of the result or socio-economic equality, but only formal equality that means ensuring it by mechanisms of its «factual» implementation.