The issues balance of intellectual rights regulation in connection with usage of internet technology is among the most critical ones on the modernization agenda. On the one hand, free and fast access to information is one of the crucial conditions of societal development in the modern world. On the other hand – dissemination of production on the Internet very often violates the intellectual rights of its creators.
The evaluation system of the activities of departments and certain employees of the militia (now – police) on the basis of statistical indicators that reflect the amount of completed work of a certain kind (the “quota system”) is one of the most challenging problems for the reform of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The tendency of employees at all levels to adjust their activities to the “good” indicators results in several negative consequences: upward distortions in reports, the striving for “good” indicators to the prejudice of the purpose of work, evasion of registration of certain offences and fabrication of evidence in case of others, formal approach to certain responsibilities, and neglect of those that do not influence the accountability reports.
The system of birth certificates was planned to be one of the most important instruments of Russian demographic policy, and was a major tool in the shaping of the healthcare system. The essence of this innovation consists of creating financial instruments, which provide for the possibility of prenatal services and obstetrics “follows” the patient. At the same time, it presupposes that the women will be able to pick a medical facility and a doctor which she finds the most trustworthy and convenient.
Three years after the start of the program, the Institute for the Rule of Law analyzed the real work of the birth certificate system and detected key barriers standing in the way of its successful functioning.
Throughout the last 20 years, the role of the private sector in the sphere of security services has been on the rise globally. These changes are connected with the increase of the demand for private security, transformation of functions of the police, and the global tendency of privatization of the public sector. In Russia, the demand for private security is also explained by the crime dynamics, low quality of work of the law-enforcement organs, and the sense of insecurity felt by the population, as well as the growing need on part of the businesses to ensure the safety of their property.
In order to conduct police reform in Russia it is necessary to determine what problems such a reform must tackle. It is on this that the character, scale, and the sequence of reforms depend.
In this policy paper, we apply a problem-oriented approach to the reform. This approach is based on identification of the most salient problems, demanding immediate action, and a number of measures that could help solve them.
In this study we compare legislative activity in Russia with countries of the former USSR and Eastern Europe. We also evaluate stability of the legislation and the influence it exerts on the quality of the legal sphere in these countries. The comparison shows that low legislative activity and maintenance of communist-era legal codes does not in itself indicate weakness of the legal system. For instance, in several countries, such as the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia, legislative stability is conducive to legal certainty, greater independence of courts, and maturity of the civil society. In Russia and Ukraine increase in the number of laws does not bring about resolution of problems or improvement of the legal field, but rather causes instability of the civil turnover, stalls economic development, and weakens the civil society. In those countries where legislation is stable, there forms a legal environment that is conducive to economic growth.
The year 2009 opened with a discussion on the possible reform of law enforcement agencies in Russia. A standard recipe of such a reform, usually recommended by international organizations, is a sharp decrease in the numbers of law enforcement personnel coupled with pay rises, increases of expenditures on equipment and on strengthening of control over security offices (which also entails expenses). Statistical data indicates that, globally, these measures indeed lead to success most of the time. Is it, however, suitable for Russia? In this piece we analyze in what ways the scale of funding as well as the number of personnel influence the productivity of police forces in the post-socialist countries: the republics of the former USSR and Eastern European countries.
Various reforms will prove to be ineffective in situations, which the judges have no choice between acquitting and convicting the defendant. A crucial condition of success in any undertaking in the sphere of criminal justice and law enforcement is freeing the judges from structural barriers that do not let them acquit the defendants due to insufficiency of evidence or close cases on rehabilitating and non-rehabilitating grounds. These structural barriers originate primarily from the procuracy.
It is estimated that cases filed upon applications of the Pension Fund involving sums of less than 1000 roubles take up around 8 percent of the whole budget of the system of arbitration, which amounts to over 1 billion 400 million roubles (these numbers are unclear, maybe 1.4 billion rubles is better) per year. At the same time, the cumulative income of the state earned from settling these cases is slightly over 130 million roubles per year. The net loss, therefore, exceed 1,27 billion roubles per year, i.e. 9 roubles per each citizen of Russia yearly.
In the 2000s, especially beginning with 2002, we witnessed a fast growth of activity of law enforcement agencies in registering crimes (and initiating criminal cases) according to articles connected with economic activities. This growth also brought about an increase in the workload for the investigative authorities and courts in relation to the above-mentioned offences. The increase in the number of initiated criminal cases caused an increase in the number of solved cases admitted by the investigation, their transfer to the courts and delivery of verdicts.
