June 10, 2020

Finding trust in Russian courts: an impossible task?

topic:	Political violence
located:	Russia
editor:	Igor Serebryany

Tens of thousands of people in Russia could have been serving prison terms for crimes they did not commit, hundreds on politically motivated sentences, the Memorial human rights monitoring society said in its recent survey. 

The number of political prisoners can be as high as one thousand, despite Russian authorities claiming there isn't a single one. The Memorial stressed it didn't include those prosecuted on religious basis into the list.

The survey covers the period of 2018-2019. According to the report, the number of people imprisoned for various disputes with the authorities (excluding religious disputes) increased six-fold compared to 2015.

It is not an easy task to find out which sentences are unjust, the Memorial's deputy chairman Nikita Petrov admits. "On one hand, it is commonly agreed that a court's ruling draws a line under disputes of who is right and who is wrong. On the other, we all are too well aware that the court's ruling can be unfair on its own," he says.

Petrov adds that not only could the court's sentences be unjust, but the laws themselves might also contradict the Constitution as well as the justice system as it is understood by society as a whole. "Federal lawmakers often pass bills which have been disputed in a Constitutional Court by human rights activists. Sometimes, it's seen from the first sight that those laws are unlawful, however strange that may sound. Similarly, the courts' decisions often are openly unjust and this is visible without any legal expert's apprisal," he says.

Petrov does not argue that in nearly any court hearing the losing side believes that the sentence is unjust: "This is why to evaluate objectively if a court made a right or wrong ruling, the society in which it operates must develop a wide consensus on what is right and what is wrong."

Adding that, "For example, a bribe-taker who stole billions may receive two years of a suspended term, while a man who threw a paper cup at a policeman gets five years in a real labour camp."

This is a statistical fact that nearly 100 per cent of the court sentences in Russia are condemnatory. The legal society in this country agrees that it is virtually impossible for David (the lawyers) to defeat the Goliath (the State) in courtrooms. Such a state of affairs leads to absolutely absurd practical consequences, contradicting legal procedures and common sense alike.

It happens that the courts convict people who have nothing to do with an alleged crime, chairperson of the Tamir bar association Oxana Mikhalkina says. "Once I defended a person accused of a grave crime – a murder. In the courtroom, I proved it with facts that the suspect has been in the other city on the day of the murder. The witnesses also confirmed his alibi. We drove the judge into the corner: she was unable to acquit the suspect because that means she would be disciplined by the court authority; at the same time, she couldn't accuse him because she would also be disciplined for sentencing an innocent person. So the judge made Solomon's decision: she gave the suspect a minimal sentence permissible by the Criminal Code and cancelled the term by the set of mitigations," the lawyer says.

She notes that every Russian citizen knows it "from birth" that looking for justice in the Russian courts is a futile business. That leads to cynical practice when the conflicting parties rush to the courtroom accusing each other of whatever offence they can propose, exploiting the system's "first come first served" principle.

"So the work of Russian lawyers is not to secure an acquittal in a courtroom but to mitigate the sentence as much as possible. No lawyer in Russia, however experienced, is able to rescue his or her client from the condemnatory sentence," Mikhalkina admits.