As noted by the head of the Duma Defense Committee Andrey Kartapolov, giving the president the authority to approve the Naval Charter of the Navy will return the document to its historical and centuries-old status.
MOSCOW, December 7. /tass/. The State Duma Committee on Defense recommended that deputies vote for the adoption of a government bill providing for the empowerment of the President of the Russian Federation to approve the Ship Charter of the Russian Navy. This was reported by the press service of the committee on Tuesday.
As noted in the explanatory note, the draft law establishes "the powers of the President of the Russian Federation to approve the Ship Charter of the Navy, <...> the ship charter will be a separate special regulatory legal act, including in relation to general military charters." The Cabinet of Ministers pointed out that in 2007, the general military regulations of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation were approved by a decree of the President of Russia, "the legal status of the Ship's Charter has changed dramatically - it has become practically a by-law."
"As practice has shown, [the charter] has begun to fall out of the legal field of the Russian Federation, losing its status as a normative legal act," the accompanying documents say. Often, the Cabinet explained, the arguments of the commanders of ships that they act in accordance with the Ship's Charter are not accepted when analyzing incidents, because "there is a document of the highest legal force."
The authors of the bill draw attention to the fact that the Ship Charter "all the more requires approval by presidential decree," since "the actions of the commanders of ships (commanders of ship formations) are associated with the potential for international conflicts in peacetime, and this is the level of regulation of the President of the Russian Federation and the Russian Foreign Ministry."
As noted by the head of the Duma Defense Committee Andrey Kartapolov, giving the President of Russia the authority to approve the Naval Ship Charter will return the document to its historical and centuries-old status.