Panel Rules Gorbachev Rally Decree Is Invalid : Soviet Union: It is the first legal check on the leader’s actions. The policy had been spottily enforced.

In a non-confrontational but precedent-setting decision, the Constitutional Compliance Committee on Friday invalidated a decree issued by President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, demonstrating that the Soviet leader’s actions are now subject to legal limits.

“We are trying to affirm the sanctity of the constitution,” the quasi-judicial panel’s chairman, jurist Sergei S. Alexeyev, said as he made public the committee’s first decision voiding a presidential act. “In any state of law, the constitution must be sacred.”

The committee ruled that Gorbachev exceeded his legal authority when on April 20 he ordered that the Council of Ministers, not Moscow city officials, would decide if political rallies should be permitted in the heart of the Soviet capital.

To outraged radicals and progressives, Gorbachev’s decree seemed to expose the undemocratic reality of Soviet power. The radicals’ candidates recently won a majority on the Moscow City Council, and the president seemed to be moving to circumscribe their effectiveness.

Gorbachev, who is also general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, issued the decree after numerous demonstrations with raucous anti-Communist themes took place just outside the Kremlin.

The Constitutional Compliance Committee, which was created by the national Parliament in December to rule on the constitutionality of disputed national laws and acts of the government, decided that Gorbachev had improperly “narrowed” the sphere of responsibility of the Moscow City Council, which according to Soviet law is sovereign on city territory.

“We have acknowledged that the presidential decree on rallies and demonstrations within (Moscow’s) Garden Ring Road is not in line with the constitution,” Alexeyev said.

The 21-member committee noted in its decision that Gorbachev, as Soviet president, is not empowered to make changes or amendments in laws.

Asked whether he thought the president would submit to the committee’s authority, Alexeyev answered: “I think he believes in the ideals of a law-governed state.”

The committee’s decision came only two days before a scheduled march by radicals from Gorky Park to a square near the Kremlin to demand the resignation of Prime Minister Nikolai I. Ryzhkov and the adoption of a 500-day program to privatize the economy by taking it out of the central government’s hands.

One of the march’s organizers has estimated that as many as 400,000 people will take part. The Moscow City Council has authorized the march, but the position of the Council of Ministers, of which Ryzhkov is chairman, has not been made public.

Although the constitutional committee’s decision was the first legal check on a Soviet leader’s acts, it would be premature to call it the Soviet equivalent of Marbury vs. Madison, the 1803 case in which the U.S. Supreme Court first declared unconstitutional a law enacted by Congress.

For one thing, Gorbachev’s decree had been spottily enforced. Less than an hour before the committee made its decision known at a news conference in a building across from the Kremlin, the police did nothing to stop scores of protesters toting the blue, red and white tricolor of czarist Russia and rallying near the city hall.

Gorbachev himself apparently did not hold the decree very dear. He has formed a commission to try to forge a new policy on allowing demonstrations in central Moscow.

According to the committee’s ruling, Gorbachev’s order will be suspended until it is brought into conformity, apparently by Gorbachev himself, with a 1988 government decision that empowers local authorities, in Moscow’s case the City Council and the Parliament of the Russian republic, to make the rules on demonstrations.