One of the important directions of the state national policy is the protection and preservation of the cultural identity of the peoples and ethnic communities of the Russian Federation, as evidenced by amended Article 69 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation. The realization of new constitutional provisions dictates the need to analyze the current mechanism for the protection of relevant rights and offer scientific recommendations based on their results to improve corresponding legal regulation.

The article examines the genesis and formation of national cultural rights in Russia. The article contains a conclusion that the formation of rights of this group is mutually conditioned by the development of cultural and national rights, including the right to national identity. The special attention is paid to the Soviet period of development of national cultural rights, which had a significant impact on legal approaches to understanding, content and regulation of the group of pending rights. The paper concludes that these rights are significantly "sensitive" to every person that requires the establishment of a comprehensive system of guarantees and improvement of the human rights protecting mechanism.

To this end, the features of this group of rights have been identified. According to the authors, the main specific legal characteristic of national cultural rights is the inclusion of a significant amount of collective rights enjoyed by the ethnic communities. This feature determines the existence of special collective forms of state protection of national cultural rights, such as legislative guarantees of the activities of national cultural autonomies, communities of indigenous small peoples and other forms.

The conducted research made it possible to identify separate directions for the development of legislative regulation on the mechanism for the protection of national and cultural rights. Among them: the modernization of legislation on national cultural autonomy, the impact of digitalization proceeded on all spheres of public life on the realization and protection of this group of rights. The authors believe that using the full potential of the mechanism for the protection of national cultural rights, including its regional components, will significantly increase the legal guarantees for the realization of human rights and freedoms.