Lawyer to the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court: "Justice in Russia has become an appendage of the power"

The well-known Moscow lawyer Alkhaz Abagdzhava published in his blog an appeal to the Chairman of the Supreme Court of the country, in which he asked him extremely unpleasant questions about the state of Russian justice:

“Dear Vyacheslav Mikhailovich!

While you are the Chairman of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, I have to address you in this way.

And you have been heading the Supreme Court since 1989 and will continue to chair it until 2025.

Everything that has happened to the courts in our country over these 32 years, one way or another, is on your conscience.

I, as an ordinary citizen and as a lawyer, am a consumer of a public service called "justice" and have the full constitutional right to express my opinion on the quality of this service.

So, the court, in my deep conviction, based on facts from my own practice and my esteemed colleagues, over the years of your leadership has turned from a separate branch of government and an independent arbitrator into an appendage of the executive power, and in criminal and administrative cases, even into an appendage of a part of this the authority in charge of criminal and administrative prosecution.

The facts that lie on the surface and that you have nothing to refute:

- the share of acquittals is one third of one percent;

- at the same time, the share of acquittals with the participation of juries is about 15-20 percent, and in district courts it reaches almost 30 percent;

- at the same time, the share of cases considered by jury trials has been methodically reduced during your reign and is now within tenths of one percent!;

Overturns of convictions based on jury verdicts are as rare as non-jury acquittals;

- but the cancellation of acquittals, rendered on the basis of jury verdicts, is 80 (!) percent.

I have a question for you, is this not evidence of the accusatory bias of the courts?

When questions about the application of the most stringent measures of restraint were given to the courts, this was done out of the best intentions. Say, take these issues out of the jurisdiction of the criminal prosecution bodies, thereby achieving fairer and more objective decisions.

Tell you how the courts ruined this idea? And, well, yes, you yourself participated in this.

If we reduce the entire negative evolution of the consideration of cases on the application of preventive measures, as a result, we have received, completely detached from the circumstances of the case, prompt and almost one hundred percent satisfaction of the requests of the investigating authority.

The court does not look into the legality of the initiation of the case, or the validity of the charge, or the qualification of the act. But what can I say, the court does not need proof of the prosecution's arguments about the impossibility of applying another measure of restraint.

The cherry on top of this non-festive cake is the extension of the detention of the accused by the courts, even when the prosecutor's office is against and even when the investigating authority itself comes out with a motion for a softer measure of restraint.

I will ask again, I am stubborn, but this is not evidence of the court's accusatory bias?

How the court buried h. 1.1. Article 108 of the Criminal Procedure Code, you must know. According to my complaints to the Supreme Court, your deputies answered "everything is lawfully justified". In two such cases, I received decisions of the ECHR on the payment of compensation, contrary to your decisions.

But the most interesting thing is that it does not fit into my legal worldview, as the Supreme Court signed the decisions of its plenums with one hand, where it clearly prescribed a ban on the detention of entrepreneurs, and with the other hand signed refusals to my complaints and my colleagues, where we pointed to direct violation of the recommendations of the Armed Forces?

The facts only from my practice about how judges substitute for the criminal prosecution body, how they openly violate the fundamental principles of legal proceedings, how they display appalling incompetence, and sometimes just legal illiteracy, will be enough for more than one dissertation.

I will not describe all this, I will only ask you the last question:

How do you get along with everything?"