Ayup Gagiev argues against changes in borders between Chechnya and Ingushetia

On September 12, Ayup Gagiev, the chair of the Constitutional Court of Ingushetia, declared that the agreements with the authorities of the unrecognized Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, which served as the basis for the agreement on the changed administrative border signed by Ramzan Kadyrov and Yunus-Bek Evkurov, had no legal force.

The "Caucasian Knot" has reported that the agreement on the consolidation of the border between Chechnya and Ingushetia signed on September 26, 2018, provoked mass protests in Ingushetia. On October 30, the Constitutional Court of Ingushetia declared the Ingush law on the border with Chechnya unconstitutional. However, the Constitutional Court of Russia considered the same issue on December 6, 2018, recognized the legality of the agreement, and announced its immediate entry into force.

Ayup Gagiev, the chair of the Constitutional Court of Ingushetia, continued to criticize the legal justification of the border agreement with Chechnya. He returned to the issue on his Facebook page and gave a legal analysis of the agreements on the Chechen-Ingush border of 1993-1994, since the 2018 agreement was based on them.

The treaty "On the principles for determining the borders of the territory" of July 23, 1993, and the Agreement on the revision of the state border between the Chechen Republic-Ichkeria and the Republic of Ingushetia of March 29, 1994, concluded by Ruslan Aushev, President of Ingushetia, with the leaders of Ichkeria, "initially did not and could not have any legal force, but were purely political in nature," believes Ayup Gagiev. He explained that such agreements could be concluded only with the participation of the federal centre, and Ichkeria itself was an unrecognized republic. On the Chechen side, the agreement was signed by the person illegitimate from the point of view of the Russian laws, and in their essence, those documents contradict the Russian laws, Ayup Gagiev emphasizes.

This article was originally published on the Russian page of 24/7 Internet agency ‘Caucasian Knot’ on September 13, 2019 at 05:55 pm MSK. To access the full text of the article, click here.