Vladimir Putin signals return as president with court reform

Source: The Telegraph (UK)

The Russian prime minister, Vladimir Putin, has been accused of plotting his return as president after the Kremlin announced plans to strip judges of the right to elect the head of the country's powerful constitutional court.

By Adrian Blomfield in Moscow

The loss of the judiciary's last quasi-independent position would remove any lingering potential for a legal challenge should Mr Putin make an early presidential comeback. After serving consecutive four-year terms, Mr Putin was obliged to step down as president last year. He became prime minister instead and shoehorned his long-term protege, Dmitry Medvedev, into his old job.

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Practically, the decision is likely to make little difference beyond making an unlikely challenge to Mr Putin's ambitions impossible. The constitutional court has not challenged a Kremlin-backed law since at least 2004, while its president, Valery Sorkin, last month called on the government to "employ authoritarian methods" to prevent Russia from slipping into anarchy because of the financial crisis.

Even so, Kremlin critics said the move completed Mr Putin's ambitions to exert total control over the judicial, executive and legislative branches of government, as well as the television media, under a so-called "power vertical". "The vertical has almost been completed," said Valeriya Novodvorskaya, an outspoken dissident of the Soviet era. "Only the lawyers are not appointed, but that will be the next step."

Read more: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/5319498/Vladimir-Putin-signals-return-as-president-with-court-reform.html