Center for Strategic Research has published its report "Proposals for Improving the Judicial System" co-authored by Vadim Volkov, Kirill Titaev, Aryna Dzmitryieva, and Timur Bocharov. The report provides a diagnostic assessment of the work of the Russian judicial system based on a series of empirical studies. These studies have revealed a number of issues that need to be addressed. The report suggests such policy measures as improving the quality of personnel; removing organizational restrictions and giving judges greater independence and the judicial system greater autonomy; and reducing the workload and simplifying the judicial process.
The new issue of "Russian Politics & Law: Law Enforcement and the Courts in Russia: Studies from the Institute for the Rule of Law of the European University at Saint-Petersburg" has been published. The issue consists of the article translations of the IRL researchers.
A new article by IRL junior researcher Irina Chatsverykova has been published in «International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice».
A new article by IRL researcher Ekaterina Moiseeva has been published in «International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice».
"Open Police Project" has prepared a new infographic about typical working process of an investigation officer, a police detective, a district police officer and a police department on the whole.
The Russian president has approved a National Anti-Corruption Plan every two years since 2008 and considers that struggle one of his top law enforcement priorities. Most agencies from the police to the courts publish separate statistical reports charting corruption-related crimes. However, 80 percent of all bribery convictions in 2014 involved sums of no more than 10,000 ($162) rubles, according to the judicial department of the Supreme Court.
This report relies on unparalleled evidence from the universe of convicted people in 2009’s Russia. It exposes new facts and figures on crime and
punishment severity in the country. Even though the data vintage is 2009 it reveals important timeinvariant patterns in law enforcement and criminal activity. The scope of the evidence and its level of detail make the report stand out in the field of criminology and empirical legal studies.
Ella Paneyakh examines a critical source of prosecution and conviction bias in that country – the system by which prosecutors, police, judges, and other legal professionals are evaluated. More specifically, she demonstrates how that system (exclusive of any inherent corruption or bias) institutionalizes incentives for the prosecution of large numbers of defendants in routine cases for the purpose of meeting informal quotas. Officials from a variety of law enforcement agencies, seeking to “hit their numbers,” develop techniques of selecting the “right” cases (and avoiding “wrong” ones), manipulating charges depending on the victim’s and defendant’s statuses.
This article contributes to the sociological research of sentencing disparities. Using the dataset consisting of 1.5 million individual decisions of criminal courts of the Russian Federation, the study focuses on the influence of socio-economic status of defendants on decisions to acquit, imprison, suspend imprisonment as well as on the severity of punishment. The regression analysis shows strong and consistent social inequalities.
The Concept for Comprehensive Organizational and Managerial Reform of the Law Enforcement Agencies of the Russian Federation, prepared by the Institute for the Rule of Law at the European University, St. Petersburg, proposes creating interdepartmental systems of mutual oversight, opening up law enforcement agencies to public
oversight, and eliminating the incentives and conditions that induce law enforcement personnel to commit illegal actions and apply the law selectively.
