Substitution

The scandal surrounding the case of a seriously ill businesswoman Natalya Gulevich, who was assigned an unbearable bail of 100 million rubles by the Moscow City Court, despite the decision of the European Court to immediately hospitalize her in a civilian hospital, the ongoing deaths of the accused in the pre-trial detention center before the verdict gave rise to a heated discussion in society: where is the very Medvedev liberalization of the judiciary and the notorious dismantling of the Gulag, which was announced from the highest tribunes?

In April 2010, the State Duma adopted amendments to the Code of Criminal Procedure, which prohibited judges from taking into custody those accused on so-called economic articles. Nobody argues: the amendments are wonderful. The thing is different: Medvedev is such a weak president that, initiating a good law, he is not able to achieve its implementation and overcome the desperate resistance of the security forces and judges, who, in fact, depreciated his amendments.

Realizing that the law does not work, and business is fleeing the country, human rights activists have repeatedly demanded an amnesty for entrepreneurs. There was no amnesty. And wishing to reassure the public, the Moscow City Court revealed its statistics last week.

It turns out that in 11 months of 2011, under the articles that fell under the presidential amendments, only 3 people were taken into custody. Speaking at a meeting of the Presidential Council for Human Rights on November 24, Deputy Chairman of the Moscow City Court Dmitry Fomin explained who these three were. We are talking about the accused under Art. 176 (“Illegal receipt of a loan”) and art. 199 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (“Tax Evasion from the Organization”). These are exotic and rare articles. It is for them since April 2010 that it is imperatively forbidden to take the accused into custody. The same three people were arrested only because there were special circumstances specified in the law (a previously chosen preventive measure was violated, someone was wanted).

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Medvedev is such a weak president that, while initiating a good law, he is unable to enforce it

”

But on the other two most common economic articles - 159 ("Fraud") and 160 ("Embezzlement") - in 2011, 311 people were arrested in Moscow (7 decisions were later canceled at cassation).

Why? The presidential amendments say that if the crimes are committed in the field of entrepreneurial activity, then “fraudsters” should not be taken into custody. And here comes the very substitution, which is difficult to understand if you do not carefully delve into the legal subtleties. From the point of view of the judges, Khodorkovsky and Lebedev are not entrepreneurs, Natalia Gulevich, General Director of State Enterprise Status, all the more so, and along with them dozens and hundreds of other entrepreneurs registered in the state register, are ordinary swindlers. The Supreme Court has already pointed out this substitution for the chairman of the Moscow City Court Egorova, by issuing a private ruling in the MBKh case. The plenum of the Supreme Court also spoke on this issue. But this did not change the judicial practice, which is quite understandable: after all, as a rule, business prisoners are held accountable at the order of competitors and security officials. It is in a pre-trial detention center that it is easier to persuade them to give the necessary evidence and renounce property.

Human rights activists also pinned great hopes on the list of diseases approved by the government, according to which those in the SIZO are required to be released into the wild. But it is no different from the previous one, according to which already convicted people could go free. In both cases, we are talking about fatal diseases, and if Magnitsky or Trifonova were alive, they would never have been released. Only the dying or those who can no longer be kept in a pre-trial detention center are released - there are no orderlies in prison hospitals.

Can we talk about the dismantling of the Gulag? Hardly. For me, over the 10 years of the rule of two St. Petersburg lawyers, we are increasingly sinking into the abyss of cruelty and inquisitorial justice ...