Alexei Trochev

Suing Russia at Home

Despite Russias turn away from democracy and deep cynicism about the judiciary, Russians are suing government officials with increasing frequency, and they often win. The regime tolerates this situation because it has opposing priorities: to ensure social harmony while rewarding bureaucratic loyalty.

All Appeals Lead to Strasbourg? Unpacking the Impact of the European Court of Human Rights on Russia

The author explores how Russian government officials and judges interact with the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) and argues that the Russian judiciary may be the most ECtHR-friendly branch of Russian government. Russian judges increasingly refer to the jurisprudence of the ECtHR, despite facing a host of pressures to do otherwise. As a result, the Russian legal system’s adherence to the standards of the 1950 convention is a complicated work in progress that develops in fits and starts and in which those in power wrestle with the question of their legal autonomy to limit the domestication of European human rights standards in Russia’s governance.

Meddling with Justice: Competitive Politics, Impunity, and Distrusted Courts in Post-Orange Ukraine

Contrary to the theories of judicial empowerment that argue that the presence of strong political opposition is necessary for the development of an independent judiciary, the increasing fragmentation of power in today’s Ukraine goes hand-in-hand with judicial disempowerment - dependent courts regularly provide important benefits to rival elites.

Judging Russia: Constitutional court in Russian politics, 1990–2006

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Judges and Their Allies: Rethinking Judicial Autonomy through the Prism of Off-Bench Resistance

The social construction of judicial power is a complicated process, especially in hybrid political regimes. We argue that off-bench resistance against blatant interference supported by vibrant social networks is an important manifestation of judicial autonomy. By drawing on evidence from field research, media coverage, and the existing scholarly literature, we clarify the logic of off-bench judicial resistance against external interference, outline a taxonomy of five strategies of resistance in hybrid regimes, and explain the political implications of off-bench judicial behavior.

How Federal Is the Russian Federation

It is undeniably true that in the last 8 years Russian law has experienced an extraordinary period of unification. Whether the Russian Federation (Russia) continues to operate a federal system of government, however, is a question on which reasonable minds differ. On the one hand, its constitution proclaims Russia to be a “federal, rule-of-law” state, divides the country into 83 component states of six different types, and appears to allocate separate spheres of both exclusive and shared jurisdiction to both the central government and to the component states. On the other hand, Russia’s political system has grown increasingly centralized and the actual implementation of the Constitution’s division of jurisdiction between governments has resulted in such an extraordinary degree of central control that the de facto federal nature of the system is thrown into doubt.

Editor’s Introduction: Code of Administrative Court Proceedings of the Russian Federation

This issue of Statutes & Decisions contains the English-language translation of chapters 1–20 of the Code of Administrative Court Proceedings of the Russian Federation (CACP) with amendments current as of February 2017, and the following issue will continue the remainder of the CACP. The Code was adopted inMarch 2015 and has entered into force as of September 2015 with the exception of provisions that have entered into legal force in September 2016 and on January 1, 2017. The CACP is a product of serious compromises between judges and the executive. In the fall of 2000, the Russian Supreme Court introduced in the State Duma the bill authorizing the creation of administrative courts, territorial jurisdiction of which would not match district and provincial boundaries, and received support of Vladimir Putin. However, by the fall of 2003, presidential administration chose not to set up separate administrative courts and placed the issue on the backburner. Instead, Putin’s administration proposed to have the already existing courts of general jurisdiction conduct new administrative judicial proceedings. The Supreme Court introduced the drafts of the Code in 2006 and 2008 in the State Duma yet the Duma adopted the draft in the first reading only in 2013. Much of the content of the CACP replaces the provisions of the Russian Civil Procedure Code: it simplifies some procedures by allowing written-only proceedings (except in cases of involuntary hospitalization, detention of deportees, complaints against court bailiffs, and election-related disputes) and it complicates some proceedings by Statutes & Decisions, vol. 51, no. 2, 2017, pp. 147–149.

Kazakhstan's New Criminal Procedure: Responsibilities and Oversight in Pretrial Investigation

This issue of Statutes and Decisions contains translations of four unpublished documents regulating the division of responsibilities and oversight in pretrial investigation under Kazakhstan’s newly adopted Criminal Procedure Code (CPC). While the translation of this code will be published in the subsequent issues of Statutes and Decisions, these four documents—two orders of the procurator-general and two orders of the minister of internal affairs—define powers and procedures during pretrial investigation, the most important stage of criminal proceedings in Kazakhstan. The first document, “Order of the Minister of Internal Affairs of the Republic of Kazakhstan no. 930 of December 24, 2014, ‘On Defining Responsibilities in the Pretrial Investigation of Criminal Misdemeanors Among Bodies of Internal Affairs,’” divides the powers to investigate criminal misdemeanors, introduced by the 2014 Criminal Code (see previous issue of Statutes and Decisions for its translation) among different units and officers of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD). Dividing these powers is important for clarifying the lines of accountability within the MVD and for reducing the risk of the abuse of powers by MVD personnel. It is also important because criminal misdemeanors keep law-enforcement officials busy. According to the official statistics, criminal misdemeanors comprised about 30 percent of all criminal cases handled by the courts in 2015. The next translated document is an “‘Instruction on Organizing the Oversight of the Legality of the Pretrial Stage of Criminal Proceedings,’

Editor's Introduction: Criminal Procedure Code of the Republic of Kazakhstan

This issue of Statutes and Decisions contains the English-language translation of the first 110 articles of the Criminal Procedure Code of the Republic of Kazakhstan. Subsequent issues of Statutes and Decisions will contain the rest of the translated Criminal Procedure Code. This code, which was adopted in 2014 and entered in force in January 2015, contains many innovations. Although criminal procedure remains essentially inquisitorial with a strong pro-accusation bias, the newly adopted Criminal Procedure Code abolishes the phase of preliminary investigation based on the Ukrainian model and introduces the U.S.style plea bargain and “Miranda warning”—an obligation of the police to warn suspects of their rights before arresting them. All of these greatly simplify the work of detectives and investigators by reducing the burden of paperwork. The code creates the position of an investigative judge responsible for deciding detentions, releasing on bail, and so on, based on the Latvian and Ukrainian models. Kazakhstan hired some 400 judges in 2014 to provide human resources for this function. At that time, Kazakhstan was ranked 185th in terms of the share of pretrial detainees (11.7%) in the prison population, the same figure as in Uzbekistan, which was the lowest ranking among the post-Soviet states. According to law enforcement officials, the newly introduced restriction of detention only for charges that carry longer than a five-year term of imprisonment resulted in fewer judge-ordered detentions, causing most jails to be empty at the beginning of 2015. This comes on top of modernization of court proceedings and improvements of courthouses even if they are populated by incompetent and corrupt court officers. The code has also introduced a mediation procedure in criminal

Legitimacy, accountability and discretion of the Russian courts

The two decades of judicial reforms in Russia have produced a puzzling duality of judicial behavior.1 On the one hand, little has changed in the way judges handle criminal cases, as indicated by the stable pre-trial detention and acquittal rates. On the other hand, Russian judges have increasingly ruled against the federal government in cases brought by individuals and companies, something unimaginable during the Soviet period.