“Right to know”: Russia needs a revolution in justice

The only revolution Russia needs is that of justice and application of law. The current situation of the Russian legal system stems the development of all spheres of public life. However, the reform must not be done in a simplified or even primitive way, like “dismiss all judges and hire new ones”.

Yury Pilipenko, First Vice-President of the Federal Chamber of Advocates of the Russian Federation, Managing Partner of the Law Firm "YUST", the guest of the author’s program “Right to know” by Vitaly Ushkanov, believes that the implementation of elected justices of peace, as is the custom “in the majority of the so-called civilized countries of the world”, might become one of the stages of the reforms: “Furthermore, nowadays the authority of chairmen of district and regional courts should be limited. It is no secret that this authority tends to dictate certain content of rulings and sentences pronounced on common cases as well as on widely known ones. Chairmen of the courts may also be elected, for a maximum of two years”, - believes Y.Pilipenko.

Speaking on the possibilities of convocation of the Constitutional Assembly, the advocate said that he was not sure of the necessity to materially alter the text of the country’s Basic Law. “However, changes are in order, which relate to the political organization of the State and its electoral system”, - opines Y.Pilipenko.

The guest of the program continues: “In today’s Russia, the law per se is frequently used for protection of the authorities from a common citizen”. He provides some arguments in favour of this point. First of all, he is extremely amazed at the position of Valery Zorkin, Chairman of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation, who writes in one of his articles: “The Constitution and the laws are not enough. Strength is required”. Y.Pilipenko is indignant: “And it is not some police officer talking, but a highly respected professor at law, an intelligent person!” His opinion is that this example shows just how our law “turns increasingly aggressive and imperative”.

Second, we should stop treating the law as just some texts written on paper. The guest of the program says: “Roughly speaking, the law is like a combination of a stick and a carrot, according to the situation we are currently in. I am deeply convinced that it is the “party of the stick” that is gaining the upper hand today”. Y.Pilipenko illustrates this by giving the example of the Article on fraud of the Penal Code of the Russian Federation: “No matter how the participants of the commercial circulation develop their relationship, there is always a situation when an investigator or a simple district police officer may classify this relationship as abuse or even fraud”, - believes the advocate.

Concerning the declared reform of the Russian advocacy, Y.Pilipenko stated that “talking is the only thing we have been witnessing during the last years”. The advocate says: “We have never seen any understandable concept of the reform. Furthermore, right at the start there was a substitution of concepts: precisely the reform of advocacy was discussed, while it would be proper to discuss the reform of the very system of legal assistance”.

However, he does not precipitately criticize the public servants of the Russian Ministry of Justice: “Quite possibly, they might have some objective circumstances, which have not allowed initiating such reform during the last four years”.

The video of the “Right to know” program with the participation of Yury Pilipenko is available here.