The Code of the Omsk Region on Social Protection of Certain Categories of Citizens within the System of Social-Security Legislation

The subject of the research is the norms of the legislation of the Omsk Region regulating relations in the sphere of social protection of the population. The aim of the study is to consider the Code of the Omsk Region on Social Protection of Certain Categories of Citizens within the system of social-security legislation. To achieve this aim, it is necessary to determine the legal foundations of codifying legislation in the sphere of social protection of certain categories of citizens; to characterize the legal regulation of individual social-support measures by the norms of the budget law; to conduct a legal analysis of certain provisions of the Code; and to develop proposals for improving regional legislation. The methodological basis is a set of scholarly methods: formal-legal, structural-functional, comparative, as well as methods of searching and analyzing scholarly and normative material. The scholarly base consists of works in the field of social-security law. Based on the research conducted, the article substantiates that a code is a form of the external expression of a regional law that does not have exclusive priority over other legislative acts of the Omsk Region and cannot proclaim its own supremacy over other normative legal— including legislative—acts of the Omsk Region in the sphere of social protection of certain categories of citizens. It does not contain the principal—still less the complete—body of norms regulating social-security relations at the regional level and only de jure functions as the basic normative legal act in the sphere of social protection of the population of the Omsk Region. Drawing on an analysis of the provisions of the Code and law-enforcement practice, the article argues that the amounts of monthly cash payments to citizens must be established by that legislative act rather than by the regional budget law, since the legal nature and subject matter of the latter are connected exclusively with state revenues and expenditures. The need is substantiated to revise individual social-support measures that have legislative deficiencies in their implementation, restrict citizens’ rights and lawful interests, and do not comply with federal legislation. To remedy these shortcomings, proposals for amending regional legislation are presented