MOSCOW. Dec 18 (Interfax) – The amnesty declared by the State Duma on Wednesday does not resolve one of the main issues in the Russian justice system, the Human Rights Watch international human rights organization said. “The amnesty will allow the release of a number of citizens and this is good. This is better than nothing but the amnesty does […]
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MOSCOW. Dec 18 (Interfax) – Investigative procedures in the so-called “third Yukos case” started two weeks after the second sentence was handed down on former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky. “Two weeks after Khodorkovsky and former top manager Platon Lebedev were sentenced, i.e. in the beginning of 2011, the police started to collect evidence for the third case,” a source familiar […]
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MOSCOW, December 5 (RIA Novosti) Investigators plan to formally charge a former Russian defense minister with negligence on Friday, according to a police source familiar with the situation. Investigators said last week they were opening a criminal case on negligence charges against Anatoly Serdyukov over claims he caused 56 million rubles ($1.7 million) of damage to the state by […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – December 3, 2013) Contrary to investigators’ claims, organizers did not intentionally orchestrate riots at the demonstration on Bolotnaya Ploshchad on May 6 last year, opposition leader Alexei Navalny told a Moscow city court on Monday. “Officials intentionally instigated the crush so as to claim there were riots,” Navalny, who was present at the protest as […]
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MOSCOW, December 3 (RIA Novosti) Two top Russian courts have criticized a proposed reform of the legal system spearheaded by the Kremlin, arguing that some of the provisions are unconstitutional, a newspaper reported Tuesday. The Supreme Court and the Supreme Arbitration Court are under an imminent reform set to be merged into a single body, a move that has […]
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MOSCOW. Dec 3 (Interfax) – The sentencing of corruption suspects to fines has practically doubled in Russia in the past two years, the Supreme Court said. “The number [of suspects] sentenced to fines has grown in the past two years, since the moment the amendments that significantly raised fines for corruptive practices came into force. Some 46.5% of all persons […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Natalya Krainova – November 28, 2013) A former senior federal prosecutor has accused her one-time colleagues of illegally intervening in the probe into the 2009 death of Hermitage Capital lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, as well as committing legal violations in connection with other high-profile cases. Galina Tarasova, who says she was fired from the Prosecutor General’s […]
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MOSCOW. Nov 27 (Interfax) – Russian citizens are divided on the bill on the unification of the Supreme Court and the Supreme Arbitration Court and a relative majority of them do not understand the authorities’ motives, a public opinion polls show. A poll conducted by Levada Center in November shows that Russians are evenly divided on this initiative 26% of […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Yekaterina Kravtsova – November 27, 2013) Seven years and 51 days have passed since journalist Anna Politkovskaya was killed in her apartment building in central Moscow, but so far only one person has been convicted in connection with the crime, leaving her family and former colleagues frustrated with the lack of progress in the case. […]
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Date: Wed, 27 Nov 2013 Subject: Hope Springs Eternal Even On The Very Brink Of Winter From: Robert Teets <rmtlaw@gmail.com> Hope Springs Eternal Even On The Very Brink Of Winter Today saw the first snowfall in Moscow, albeit with its melting as soon as the snowflakes touched the still unfrozen earth. With a constitutional jubilee soon to be upon us, […]
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MOSCOW, November 21 (RIA Novosti) The Greenpeace activists detained in Russia over a protest at an Arctic oil rig should be granted clemency, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Thursday as 10 of them were released and many others granted bail. When asked to comment on their case at a meeting with Russian writers, publishers, critics and booksellers, Putin said […]
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MOSCOW. Nov 19 (Interfax) – The Western form of juvenile justice will not work in Russia, Russian children’s rights commissioner Pavel Astakhov said. “My principled stance is that the Western style, a virtually bankrupt form of juvenile justice is not viable,” Astakhov told reporters on Tuesday. “It is not viable in Russia because the equality between parents and a child […]
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MOSCOW. Nov 19 (Interfax) – The dominant role of Investigators in criminal prosecution leads to numerous unfounded arrests, said Russian Prosecutor General Yury Chaika. “The law enforcement mechanism is apparently misbalanced, given that prosecutors have lost some of their oversight functions. Paradoxically, the prosecutor’s powers to ensure one of the most constitutional guarantees – the right to freedom and personal […]
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MOSCOW. Nov 18 (Interfax) – The Moscow Zamoskvoretsky Court has postponed until February 4, 2014 the hearing of the complaint filed by the human rights center Memorial about the prosecutors’ demand to register as a foreign agent. Thus, the court has postponed the hearing of the human rights activists’ until the Strasbourg court or the Russian Constitutional Court give their […]
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MOSCOW, November 20 (RIA Novosti) Russian lawyers criticized the Kremlin on Tuesday in a rare display of public discontent, speaking against a court reform that would abolish what they called the most progressive branch of Russia’s judiciary. Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed in July to merge the Supreme Arbitration Court, which oversees business disputes, into the Supreme Court, which […]
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ST. PETERSBURG. Nov 14 (Interfax) – The 20-year-old Russian constitution has commendably withstood the test of time, Russian Constitutional Court Chairman Valery Zorkin said. “The constitution has been tested during this drastic historic turn in the country’s life,” he told the audience at a conference, “Modern Constitutionalism. Conclusions and Prospects”, in St. Petersburg on Thursday. “It [the constitution] prevented the […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Oleg Sukhov and Ivan Nechepurenko – November 13, 2013) The State Duma on Tuesday approved in the first reading a bill seeking to merge the Supreme Arbitration Court into the Supreme Court, as the former warned that the move could signal the end of the entire arbitration court system. Arbitration courts, which hear commercial disputes, […]
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MOSCOW. Nov 12 (Interfax) – Trials in Russian courts are not sufficiently adversarial, while acquittals are seen as a systemic flaw, said the Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights Nils Muiznieks. “The criminal justice system is still set up to deliver guilty verdicts and acquittals are perceived as the system’s failure. In the rare cases where acquittals do take […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Ivan Nechepurenko – November 12, 2013) Supreme Arbitration Court judges have lambasted President Vladimir Putin’s plans to merge the legal body with the Supreme Court, saying that the resulting superstructure will be too cumbersome and less independent in administering justice. The way judges will be appointed to the new structure does not “conform with the […]
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MOSCOW, November 7 (RIA Novosti) The Russian government said Thursday it had not appealed a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights that could prompt a rollback of the Yukos case. The Strasbourg-based court ruled in July that the rights of former Yukos oil company head Mikhail Khodorkovsky were violated during his trial and continuing imprisonment in Russia […]
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(opendemocracy.net – Daniil Kotsyubinsky – November 5, 2013) Daniil Kotsyubinsky is a Russian historian and journalist based in St. Petersburg On Friday, a Russian news agency had its publishing licence revoked, supposedly for publishing two ‘profane’ Youtube clips. For Daniil Kotsyubinsky, however, the episode was but the latest example of a ‘summary execution’ intended as a warning to any […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Yekaterina Kravtsova – October 29, 2013) State pollster VTsIOM released survey results Monday regarding last month’s Greenpeace protest in the Arctic that indicate more than a third of Russians believe the protest was a foreign plot and more than two-thirds disagree with the group’s message of needing to protect the environment from oil drilling. Armed […]
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MOSCOW, October 26 (RIA Novosti) Russians must learn to perceive the decisions of courts and investigators as legitimate for the country to develop forward, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said in a televised interview Saturday. Answering a question about a high-profile corruption case that has ensnared several top Defense Ministry officials since late last year, Medvedev said that evaluating the […]
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MOSCOW, October 29 (RIA Novosti) Russian lawmakers will consider letting people who have been convicted for serious crimes run in elections, on the condition that voters are told about their criminal records. “As it turns out, people’s rights are affected, even though they’ve already been punished,” state lawmaker Sergei Ivanov of the nationalist LDPR party and author of the […]
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(opendemocracy.net – Lev Gudkov – October 22, 2013) Lev Gudkov is a Russian sociologist, director of the analytical Levada Center and editor-in-chief of the journal The Russian Public Opinion Herald. He is the author of numerous books and articles on sociology and inter-ethnic relations in Russia. Cynicism, originally a philosophy in ancient Greece, is now the prevailing mood in Putinist […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Vladimir Goryachev and Christopher Brennan – October 24, 2013) The Investigative Committee said it had dropped the piracy charges against 30 people who were on board Greenpeace’s Arctic Sunrise ship, replacing them with accusations of hooliganism. If convicted of the new charges, the 28 activists and two journalists who were taken into custody in September […]
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(Interfax – October 23, 2013) A report published on the website of the Human Rights Council under the Russian president says practically all the cases in which the Prosecutor-General’s Office (PGO) accused NGOs of being in breach of the controversial recent law on “foreign agents” have been thrown out by courts, privately-owned Russian news agency Interfax reported on 23 October. […]
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(Moscow News – themoscownews.com – Anna Arutunyan – October 16, 2013) A court last week ordered activist Mikhail Kosenko to undergo compulsory psychiatric treatment for attacking a riot police officer during the May 6, 2012 protest rally on the eve of Vladimir Putin’s inauguration. The ruling sparked concerns among rights activists that Soviet-era punitive psychiatry, when dissidents were found to […]
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(Interfax – October 16, 2013) Russian party leaders have for the most part welcomed the commutation of opposition leader and anti-corruption campaigner Aleksey Navalnyy’s sentence to a suspended one, on appeal, on 16 October. In reaction sampled by the Russian news agency Interfax, Vladimir Zhirinovskiy, of the nationalist Liberal-Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), stood out, with his call for a […]
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(Interfax – October 16, 2013) Prominent opposition activist and anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny, whom the Kirov Regional Court gave a five-year suspended prison sentence on Wednesday for embezzlement of assets belonging to the state-run timber company Kirovles, may be subject to the amnesty that the State Duma is expected to announce soon, Russian Presidential Human Rights Council head Mikhail Fedotov […]
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(Interfax – MOSCOW, October 15, 2013) Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny has said he does not expect the Kirov Regional Court to acquit him as it hears an appeal contesting Navalny’s embezzlement conviction on October 16. “I will be given a real or a suspended prison sentence, but I will not be acquitted,” he told the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper. However, […]
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(RFE/RL – Brian Whitmore – October 10, 2013) The fact that a Moscow court found Mikhail Kosenko guilty of assaulting a police officer despite video evidence to the contrary didn’t exactly come as a surprise. In recent years, Russian courts have convicted Mikhail Khodorkovsky of stealing oil from himself and Aleksei Navalny of embezzling money without making a profit, just […]
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(Bloomberg – bloomberg.com – Ilya Arkhipov & Henry Meyer – October 11, 2013) President Vladimir Putin’s human rights adviser urged prosecutors to drop piracy charges against Greenpeace activists for an Arctic protest, saying it’s as stupid as accusing them of raping the oil platform they scaled. “These charges are laughable because there isn’t the slightest justification for accusing the crew […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – October 10, 2013) At least seven Supreme Arbitration Court justices have resigned after President Vladimir Putin this week submitted a bill to the State Duma that would merge the legal body into the Supreme Court. The arbitration court on Thursday confirmed that seven judges had resigned, while an unidentified court official told Kommersant that more […]
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(RIA Novosti – MOSCOW, October 10, 2013) Russia’s Constitutional Court ruled Thursday to overturn a provision barring people convicted of major crimes from running for public office in a move that could open the way for opposition leader and recent Moscow mayoral candidate Alexei Navalny to participate in future elections. The court said in its ruling that a judicial […]
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(RFE/RL – rferl.org – Tom Balmforth – MOSCOW, October 9, 2013) Russia’s Supreme Arbitration Court is widely viewed as the country’s most impartial court. But it might not be for much longer. The Kremlin this week submitted legislation to the State Duma that would essentially abolish the body, which resolves economic disputes, by merging it with the Supreme Court. The […]
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(Interfax – MOSCOW, September 29, 2013) The problems of the Russian judicial system cannot be resolved by reform, specifically, by uniting courts, the judicial administration should become competitive and win people’s confidence, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said. “I believe this work is very difficult. It is not reduced to the signing of a law or even, for example, uniting […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Ezekiel Pfeifer – September 23, 2013) A Moscow court on Friday rejected a lawsuit brought by opposition politician Alexei Navalny seeking to cancel the results of the city’s Sept. 8 mayoral election, in which Navalny placed second behind Kremlin-backed winner Sergei Sobyanin. Navalny’s team argued that the results were illegitimate because of violations including unequal […]
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(RIA Novosti – MOSCOW, August 23, 2013) Lawyers of the two jailed members of the Russian feminist punk protest group Pussy Riot are filing a petition to have their clients’ remaining jail time replaced with community service, a Russian daily reported Friday. Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina were sentenced to two years in jail last August for their February […]
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(Interfax – MOSCOW, August 20, 2013) Pussy Riot punk band member Yekaterina Samutsevich, convicted to two years of a suspended sentence, has filed a lawsuit against her former lawyers Violetta Volkova, Nikolai Polozov and Mark Feigin. Samutsevich said she demanded to award her non-pecuniary damages for insulting statements regarding her. “The lawsuit has been filed against three lawyers: against Feigin, […]
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(opendemocracy.net – Daniil Kotsyubinsky – August 13, 2013) Daniil Kotsyubinsky is a Russian historian and journalist based in St. Petersburg For the past month, Moscow has been following the fortunes of opposition leader Aleksey Navalny trial, imprisonment, implausible release and continuing Mayoral ambitions. But can all really be as it seems? Daniil Kotsyubinsky presents an alternative view. Moscow’s hot […]
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(Interfax – MOSCOW. Aug 13, 2013) Nearly half of Russians (47%) think their rights cannot be protected in the majority of cases, and 38% claim the opposite. Twenty-four percent said their rights had been breached in the past 24 months and only 7% managed to defend themselves, the Public Opinion Foundation said in comment on a poll of 1,500 respondents […]
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(RIA Novosti – MOSCOW, August 13, 2013) Russia’s courts and judges have yet to win the public’s trust or so suggests a poll by the Public Opinion Foundation released Tuesday. Just 27 percent of respondents said they think Russian courts and judges are doing a good job, 35 percent said they were doing a bad job, and 38 […]
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(RIA Novosti – MOSCOW, August 8, 2013) Deputies from Russia’s State Duma and senior officials could be questioned by investigators looking into a decade-old case against jailed tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, sparking renewed fears that fresh charges against the once powerful businessman are imminent, Vedomosti newspaper reported Thursday. Legal experts were first questioned in September last year in connection with […]
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(Moscow News – themoscownews.com – Natalia Antonova, Acting Editor-in-Chief – August 6, 2013) It was a bit of throwaway news last week: A young man behind the wheel of a Ferrari had struck and killed a pensioner in Moscow in early July. The young man in question, rumored to be the son of a well-known businessman, was let go under […]
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(RIA Novosti – MOSCOW, August 2, 2013) Russian President Vladimir Putin said Friday that a recent real jail term for his vehement opponent Alexei Navalny was “strange,” given that another defendant in the case got away with a suspended sentence. Whistleblowing blogger Navalny was given five years in jail last month on embezzlement charges that he dismissed as fabricated by […]
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(opendemocracy.net – Kirill Koroteev – Aug. 1, 2013) Kirill Koroteev, a Russian lawyer, has worked with Memorial Human Rights Centre (Moscow) and European Human Rights Advocacy Centre on numerous cases lodged against the Russian Federation with the European Court of Human Rights. He was also a charge de mission for the International Federation for Human Rights (Paris) on Belarus and […]
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(Interfax – MOSCOW, July 31, 2013) Most of Russians have no trust in the national judiciary, Levada Center told Interfax on Wednesday referring to the July poll outcomes. Almost two-thirds of the respondents (61%) suspect that an average person cannot expect fair justice, and 27% disagree. The attitude to the Russian judiciary has been changed for the past five years. […]
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(RIA Novosti – MOSCOW, August 1, 2013) As if Fyodor Dostoyevsky wasn’t depressing enough, Russian court marshals have added a touch of Kafka to his legacy, investigating the Russian literary giant for contempt of court and only clearing him because he is no longer alive. The amusing story began with an “idiot” both the title of an 1869 […]
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(Interfax – MOSCOW, July 23, 2013) The trial of the alleged murderers of Russian investigative reporter Anna Politkovskaya that is starting on Wednesday will be “patently illegitimate,” the journalist’s son and daughter said on Tuesday, refusing to attend the trial. “In our absence and that of our lawyers, the judge began to select jurors and approved the jury,” Ilya Politkovsky […]
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