The author of the article presented a document which is obscure in the Polish specialist literature concerning political science and law, i.e. the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen adopted by the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in 1991, in the new political situation, i.e. at the beginning of the creation of the foundation of a new Russian state. The author shows the importance of the document considering a few basic aspects: for the first time in the history of Russian law, it is opened for international law in such a fundamental scope as human rights and their protection; in its content, the document refers to the historical sources of legal and natural concept of human rights and in a broader sense to the idea of a democratic country's law; it transfers the fundamental human rights standards and institutional protection of these rights onto the ground of the new Russian legislation in the way in which they were determined in the basic contemporary international documents, first of all in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; as a result, the discussed document means the end of the Soviet Union legal tradition based on the idea of legal positivism. It was emphasized that the Declaration had a crucial importance because in accordance with the resolution of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic all the provisions of the Declaration were included in the text of the Constitution of the Russian Federation. That is why the author acknowledges that the Declaration is a foundation of the Constitution of the new Russian state. Constitutionalisation of the Declaration enables a comparison of solutions referring to the basis of the idea of a state of law according to the following essential order: in the international documents, in the Declaration, in the Constitution of the Russian Federation. This comparison shows a complete convergence of the adopted solutions within the above-mentioned triad. Furthermore, the comparison (although in a limited scope) of the provisions of the Constitution of the Russian Federation with the constitutions of selected democratic countries shows even more distinctly that the most fundamental contemporary standards referring to human rights and their protection were transferred to the Russian law. In the last part of the article, the author discussed one more document - the Commonwealth of Independent States Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, also open to international law in this scope and convergent in its provisions with the content of the Constitution of the Russian Federation. The author also presented a general outline of the political and legal background to the development of the principles of the Russian Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.
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