As courts of first instance, they handle criminal cases where imprisonment is for more than 3 years, and consist of 1 judge and a jury where required.
Much international pressure was applied toward that end both before and after Russia was approved for council membership. Judges of those courts serve lifetime terms. At last permitted to walk freely Brezhnev in office and Yuriy V. President Vladimir Putin has used this structure to enhance the power of his office and dominate the government.
Pursuant to the Federal Law on Organs of the Judicial Community, which is the legal basis for the judicial organs of self-government, the All-Russian Congress of Judges is the supreme body of the judiciary. The Judicial Department of the Supreme Court of Russia is responsible for administration of the courts, such as selection and training of judicial candidates, working with law institutes, and qualifications of judges and other court officers. Judicial Qualification Collegia are bodies of judicial self-regulation that were established at the regional Judicial Qualification Collegia and national Supreme Qualification Collegium levels.
Some judges serve as a court chairperson. The court chairperson is solely responsible for the allocation of cases to judges, has considerable powers in the matters of appointment, and makes the initial recommendation for disciplinary measures, in particular dismissal. Judges are appointed by the Federation Council , [9] and serve for life.
The judges of the Constitutional Court are nominated by the President and appointed by the Federation Council for 12 years, [2] and the judges must be at least 40 years old and must retire at 70 years old. The Russian Minister of Justice is responsible for appointing judges to regional and city courts; however, in practice, many appointments below the national level still are made by the chief executives of subnational jurisdictions. Judges of the district courts are appointed by the President.
A candidate must be at least 25 years old, is expected to have received a higher legal education commonly a specialist degree , have at least 5 years of experience in the legal profession, and pass an examination from the Ministry of Justice. Justices of the peace are usually appointed by the regional legislature, but may also be elected. The Prosecutor General of Russia is the highest prosecutor in Russia, and both he and his office are independent from the executive, legislative and judicial branches of power. The Prosecutor General remains the most powerful component of the Russian judicial system.
The Investigative Committee of Russia , sometimes described as the "Russian FBI ", is the main federal investigating authority in Russia, formed in place of the Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor General in The Prosecutor General is nominated by the President of Russia and appointed by the majority of Federation Council for a term of five years. If the nomination fails, the President must nominate another candidate within 30 days.
The Russian legal profession is unregulated, but there have been moves towards unification and regulation recently. An examination is administered by the qualifications commission of a court for admission to its Advokatura. In there were 25, lawyers, [19] and in there were 47, defense lawyers in all of Russia. A juror must be 25 years old, legally competent, and without a criminal record.
There is no usage of precedent , as used in common law legal systems. As such, the law on appeal may depend on the composition of the chamber deciding the appeal. A chamber normally consists of 3 judges, out of the dozens of judges within the court 19 in the Constitutional Court, in the Supreme Court.
Without the legal principle of stare decisis , for each case a chamber may come to a different, even contradictory, conclusion, even compared to chambers within the same session. If they come to relatively consistent decisions, those in civil law legal systems call this jurisprudence constante. Everyone has the right of legal assistance.
For serious and specific crimes, the accused have the option of a jury trial consisting of 12 jurors. Jurors are selected by the prosecution and defense from a list of eligible candidates. The arbitrazh courts have been singled out as particularly effective in dealing with business issues. There have been serious violations of the accepted separation of powers doctrine.
There have been accusations of systematic attempts to undermine jury trials, including juror intimidation and bribery, and systematic trial delays. Compared to other industrialized nations, Russia has historically had a small number of lawyers in relation to its population. For a comparison to the United States , the number of active lawyers practicing before the judiciary of California as of December was more than ,, [31] while the United States Census put the California population at more than 37 million people.
The court chairperson has sole discretion for allocation of court cases, and there is no systematic procedure for allocation based on objective criteria. There have been allegations of corruption concerning the oral exam required for admission to the Advokatura , [15] known as being " called to the bar " in commonwealth countries. The crucial question of contemporary Russian judiciary is the specialisation of judges and courts.
One of the significant event on this topic was the International conference - First Siberian Legal Forum "Specialisation of judges and courts: International experience and Russian perspective", held in Tyumen city October 17—18, and organised by Tyumen State University and Dmitry Maleshin [32]. Trial by jury was first introduced in the Russian Empire as a result of the Judicial reform of Alexander II in , and abolished after the October Revolution in Lay judges were in use in the Soviet Union. The law introduced disciplinary and administrative responsibility for judges. The Federal Law on Organs of the Judicial Community, which is the legal basis for the judicial organs of self-government, was passed in From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
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Ministry of Foreign Affairs Minister: Education in Russia and List of law schools in Russia. Judicial system of the Russian Empire. Archived from the original on 25 February Archived from the original on 8 December The New York Times. State Bar of California. In tsarist times and the Communist era there were few fair trails; laws were decreed arbitrarily; and people were kept in line with threats of brutality.
A concept of fairness and justice was never developed. The criminal court system is still based on the old Soviet procedural code, which limits the rights of the accused and lacks a trial by jury. The goal of the justice system is protect the interests of the state not the individual. After the Soviet break-up Russia lacked a civil code like the ones that are the cornerstones of civil law in the United States and Europe.
Communist justice was not based on the idea of innocent until proven guilty. People charged with crimes were nearly always convicted and sentences were rarely overturned. The goal of the justice system was to protect the interests of the state not the individual and to keep the masses under control.
The judiciary was not independent. The courts were subordinate to the Communist Party and the National People's Congress and generally carried out their wishes. The Soviet Supreme Court, the highest court in the Soviet Union, was comprised of judges that served five year terms.
The legal system was often described as Kafkaesque. Laws are poorly written and in many cases are ambiguous and contradictory. Political concerns and personal whim often played a big part in legal decisions. One human rights activist told the Washington Post, "Rules are words to dance around and laws mean what the authorities say they mean. Cases were decided by a judge and two citizens, usually pensioners, called nodders because their opinions always agreed with that of the judges. In some courts, the judge also acted as the prosecutor.
Justice was sometimes very quick. People were executed within days or even hours of their arrest. The criminal court system limited the rights of the accused. There were no trials by jury. Prosecutors won 99 percent of their cases and verdicts were usually foreordained. Arrests were often announced after the prosecution had enough evidence to convict. Defense lawyers if they existed were not taken seriously. They often had to supply their own paper if they wanted copies of motions or opinions. There were few protections against arbitrary arrests and imprisonment. People were often imprisoned if they failed to produce an identity card.
Questions, if they were asked at all, came later. One high school student told Newsweek, "My grandfather, they came for him at night. My grandmother never found out what happened to him. She didn't like to talk about it. The daughter of a Baku oil baron, told National Geographic, "My father wasn't very clever. They arrested him for being a former capitalist. They put a stool pigeon in his cell. This provocateur started to curse Stalin. My father said, 'What do you want?
This comment was reported he was sent to Kazakhstan and shot. Shister was once an enthusiastic Stalin supporter. But after one husband was killed the Great Terror, another disappeared into a mental institution and she herself was sent to labor camps she changed her tune.
People who spoke up for democracy were jailed under charges of plotting to "topple the Communist system, liquidate the Warsaw Pact, dissolve the Soviet Union and promote the system of the United States.
One family was thrown out of its house and sent to the Arctic because they were labeled as bourgeoisie for owning two horses. Describing the arrest of Osip Mandelstam in May , his wife Nadezhda wrote: There wasn't a bit to eat in the house and M. At about one o'clock in the morning , there was a sharp unbearably explicit knock on the door. For a split second I had a tiny flicker of hope that this still wasn't it Without a word or a moment's hesitation, but with consummate skill and speed, they came in past me not pushing, however and the apartment was suddenly full of people already checking our identity papers, running their hands over our hips with a precise well-practiced movement, and feeling our pockets to make sure we had no concealed weapons.
One of the agents a short man, looked at him with what could have been a faint smile and said, 'Your papers. M read it and nodded After checking our papers, presenting their arrest and making sure there would be no resistance, they began to search the apartment. At last permitted to walk freely Brodski suddenly roused himself, help up his hand like a schoolboy and asked permission to go to the toilet.
The secret police despised their civilian helpers. Brodski had no doubt been ordered to sit with us that evening in case we tried to destroy any manuscripts when we heard the knock on the door. The poet Mikhail Isayevich, a former Red Army soldier who served in Berlin in World War II, was arrested after saying that the roads in Germany were good the conversation in which he said that had been recorded by a friend-informant.
He told Newsweek, that after his arrest "they put me in a car. There were four of them who came for me. In the car they always offer a cigarette. As soon as the door shut, everything changed. First they took off your hooks and buttons from your pants so you had to hold up your pants. It was downtown Rostov-on-Don, in a district where there were meat warehouses. They turned the warehouses into prisons. The average-size room was about 20 square meters. I was arrested in May. It was very hot, almost hard to breath. There were 12 people in the room I don't know why most of them were there.
They didn't torture us—no slivers under the fingernails or that sort of thing. But this is what they did: And every night they would ask the same things: I would start to nod off and they would shake me and say, 'Are you here to sleep or what? After torture and coercion even the most loyal Communists confessed to betraying the state and engaging in terrorist plots.
The judicial process was minimal. If there was a trial, the judiciary acted on orders from the Stalin regime and gave the sentences the regime wanted. Russia experimented cautiously with Western-style jurisprudence and penal reform after the break up of Soviet Union. In the mids, jury trials were introduced in some regions, and the rights of accused persons and prison inmates were stipulated more concretely. Nevertheless, major elements of the Soviet system remain in the jurisprudence of the Russian Federation.
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For example, procurators public prosecutors still have both investigative and prosecutorial functions, and expansion of the jury system has met substantial resistance among entrenched Soviet-era judges and procurators. In addition, prison conditions have deteriorated substantially because Russia's crime wave has increased the prison population but funding is not available for new facilities. In early , more than one-quarter of the prison population was awaiting trial, and pretrial detention lasted as long as three years for some individuals.
Russia's procurator general, Yuriy Skuratov, reported that his office had been overwhelmed in with 1. He noted that the same trend was continuing in After many delays and amendments, a new Criminal Code went into effect on January 1, An estimated , criminal cases were expected to require review based on the new code, and many prisoners will be released because the laws under which they were convicted no longer exist.
A separate criminal correction code defining conditions in the prison system was scheduled to go into effect in July The Ministry of Justice administers Russia's judicial system. The ministry's responsibilities include the establishment of courts and the appointment of judges at levels below the federal district courts.
The ministry also gathers forensic statistics and conducts sociological research and educational programs applicable to crime prevention. For court infrastructure and financial support, judges must depend on the Ministry of Justice, and for housing they must depend on local authorities in the jurisdiction where they sit. These circumstances, combined with irregularities in the appointment process and the continued strong position of the procurators, deprived judges in the lower jurisdictions of independent authority. Many Western observers consider the judicial and legal systems weak links in Russia's reform efforts, stymieing privatization, the fight against crime and corruption, the protection of civil and human rights, and the general ascendancy of the rule of law.
Many judges appointed by the regimes of Leonid I. Brezhnev in office and Yuriy V. Andropov in office remained in place in the mids. Such arbiters were trained in "socialist law" and had become accustomed to basing their verdicts on telephone calls from local CPSU bosses rather than on the legal merits of cases. After the collapse of the Soviet Union there were a series of efforts to reform the justice system in Russia to make it more independent and fair. The constitution was rewritten in with new laws but, initially anyway, no one knew the laws or followed them.
At best the laws were regarded as ideals that one should aspire to. Drafts to overhaul the criminal code were first passed in the Duma in but were not made into law until the were pushed through by Putin—a trained lawyer—in Over 3, amendments were added to the old code, including proposed by Putin himself. Judicial systems in Western Europe and the United States were used as models.
Among the reforms were the introduction of jury trials and habeas corpus,, the elimination of trials in absentia, guarantees of legal representation for suspects from the moment of arrest and age limits for judges 65, except for Constitutional Court judge who could serve until they were At the heart of the reforms were efforts to make the process more adversarial by giving defense lawyers more power to challenge evidence, witnesses and procedures and puts more pressure on prosecutors to argue their cases based on facts and evidence.
Judges were supposed to be detached arbiters. Judicial reform has moved slowly. In the mid s the judiciary remained subject to the influence of security agencies and politicians. A large case backlog, trial delays, and lengthy pretrial detention also remain problems,. Jury trials for all serious crimes were supposed to start in January Court requirements for searches, confiscation of documents, the seizure of property and approval for detention and reducing the power of prosecutors went into effect in January Before the reforms went in effect, judges were given a crash course on them.
Describing the judges at a one four-hour session at a Moscow courthouse, Sophia Kishkovsky wrote in the New York Times: As of the mid s, is was still not clear how the reforms would be implemented, especially for things like promised legal counsel when there was already a shortage of lawyers.
The system strained and besieged form all sides: The World Bank gave loans to Russia to help it improve its legal system. Even so the old way of doing things remained firmly entrenched. Some judges who did what was asked of them under the new system were fired for making politically unpopular decisions. Putin has used the structure of the Russian legal system to enhance the power of his office and dominate the government. His main tool has been his de facto right to appoint judges. The legal moves made against Yukos oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky—a vocal critic of Putin—were regarded as a great miscarriage of justice.
See Yukos, Economic History. In , after the Beslan school attack, which left several hundred people dead, most f them children, Putin made plans to curb the judiciary. According to the plan the President would chose the majority of the members if the Supreme Qualification Collegium. Under the proposal the organization would be reduced to 21 members with 10 members selected by the President, 10 members of the general public and one appointed by the President. The Supreme Court is Russia's highest court of origination and of appeals for consideration of criminal, civil, and administrative cases.
The Constitutional Court decides whether federal laws, presidential and federal decrees and directives, and local constitutions, charters, and laws comply with the federal constitution. Treaties between the national government and a regional jurisdiction and between regional jurisdictions are subject to the same oversight.