Judge in Russia

(Photo: Pavel Gorshkov )

“To bring us all together, Pashin must be fired!” the famous human rights activist said loudly. The hall was packed with people whose names never left the pages of newspapers during the perestroika era. Now, of course, they rarely get together all together. But Sergei Pashin is often fired: in the four years since he became a judge of the Moscow City Court, this is the second time he has been stripped of his powers. The first time he was reinstated by a panel of the Supreme Court. Now this is unlikely to happen.

The press conference of human rights activists dedicated to the re-dismissal of Pashin was more like a wake - endless and replete with exaggerations. “He is hardworking to the point of fanaticism!” exclaimed lawyer Anna Panicheva. “He is emotionally accessible! He is talented! Audiences love him, even hostile ones, for example, at the Institute of the Prosecutor’s Office.”

“When I traveled to the regions and met with human rights activists,” adds human rights activist Larisa Bogoraz, “in one city they told me: “If only Pashin ran for president!” And I want our judges to study not according to Vyshinsky, but according to Pashin.” .

“Sergey Anatolyevich!” lawyer Karina Moskalenko, director of the Center for International Protection, addressed the hero of the strange celebration. “For God’s sake, excuse me, but you cannot work there (in court. - “Itogi”), because you are a completely alien element. This is impossible. But of course we would all like you to be there."

They say this to Pashin not only to his face. A few months ago, Rustem Maksudov, head of the Center for Judicial Reform, called Pashin “the only judge in Russia.” That is, he is more than a judge. He is a litmus test. “It’s clear how the new authorities treat the courts,” an analyst at a large American research center, a specialist on Russia, recently told me. “They fired Pashin.”

This means that Moscow human rights activists did not celebrate Pashin’s wake in October: he, after all, is truly brilliantly educated, talented and charming, and will not sit idle. There were those commemorations for judicial reform.

From start to finish - one step
In 1987, a working group appeared in Moscow, which, according to its members, dealt with the concept of “alternative justice.” The participants of the group were accomplished lawyers - the current deputy chairman of the Constitutional Court Tamara Morshchakova, deputy chairman of the Presidential Council for Improving Justice Sergei Vitsin and others, all over 50. Absolutely utopian things were discussed - jury trials, for example. However, the mood of the participants was revealed by the word “alternative”: despite the fact that these were extraordinary people, whose appearance in the context of “socialist legality” can be considered almost a miracle, for them Soviet justice was still the norm of life. After some time, the work died out, but in 1991 it was revived under the leadership of a member of the Supreme Council, the wonderful lawyer Boris Zolotukhin. Among the new participants was Sergei Pashin, who was 28 years old at the time - he became the first Soviet lawyer to actually begin his career with judicial reform.

In October 1991, the Supreme Council approved a document developed by this group called the “Concept of Judicial Reform.” “Now this is a bibliographic rarity,” complains Sergei Vitsin. (I can confirm: when I was preparing material about the Russian Foundation for Legal Reforms, designed to implement the “Concept,” the staff of this organization could not, at my request, find a copy of this fundamental document.) In addition to their work in the Supreme Council, members of the working group wrote articles , promoting ideas for improving justice. “This was perceived as an attempt to shock society,” recalls Sergei Vitsin. “They told me: “Well, Sergei, jury trials? Ha-ha-ha!" But subsequently everything went in accordance with the concept: both jury trials and the transfer of the GUIN (Main Directorate for the Execution of Punishments - "Results") from the Ministry of Internal Affairs to the Ministry of Justice, only the prosecutor's office stands like a rock."

Sergei Vitsin became chairman of the Presidential Council for Judicial Reform, Sergei Pashin became his deputy and the author of the most important laws that marked the real beginning of the reforms. This is a law on judicial control over arrests, which for the first time allowed suspects to appeal a preventive measure in court. This is the draft of the new Criminal Procedure Code, which, however, was never adopted and was not even considered by the State Duma. Pashin is a co-author of the so-called model Code of Criminal Procedure, adopted by the CIS Parliamentary Assembly at the suggestion of Russia, but never adopted by any of the participating countries. This Code of Criminal Procedure would completely change the approach to judicial proceedings, forcing us to abandon the so-called inquisitorial proceedings - this is when all participants in the process try to get to the truth by any legal means - in favor of adversarial proceedings - this is when both the defense and the prosecution conduct their own investigation, then present the results in court, and the judge compares them and decides who is right.


Sergei Pashin is a frequent and welcome guest at the regional public organization for promoting the observance of human rights. (Photo: Pavel Gorshkov )

Pashin's favorite brainchild, the jury trial law, reflects a desire for the same ideal of an adversarial process. The fate of this law was not much better than the fate of the draft Code of Criminal Procedure. It started well: the law was passed and jury trials were introduced in nine regions. The Ministry of Justice and the Prosecutor General's Office were against it. “I worked then in the prosecutor’s office system,” recalls Mara Polyakova, director of the Independent Legal Expert Council. “Everyone came to us and said that it was impossible to introduce jury trials now, because the investigators were not ready. There was another fear: that we have a violent population , and everyone will be sentenced to death." As is known, the latter fear turned out to be in vain: jury trials initially acquitted about 50 percent of the defendants - what prosecutors offered as evidence was not convincing to ordinary people in half the cases. Then the quality of the investigation in those regions where jury trials were introduced improved, and acquittals became about 12 percent, which approximately corresponds to the European average and is 15 times higher than the Russian average. In other words, the experiment was a success, but it remained an experiment: the prosecutor’s office and the Ministry of Internal Affairs managed to stop the further introduction of jury trials.

Sergei Pashin, who as a Moscow judge worked without a jury, had about eight percent acquittals, that is, 10 times more than other judges. Another reason for his colleagues not to like him.

Mladoreformator
And why should we love him? Smart and talented - yes. But he knows his worth and behaves rather arrogantly. Perhaps when he lectures, he can be quite condescending - they say his students love him. But from those equal in rank, he demands equal intelligence and erudition, and if he feels his superiority, he makes it clear to others. “He was once mistaken for the head of the GPU” (State Legal Administration - “Results”),” says one of his former colleagues. Pashin never headed the GPU, but worked there for some time on some vague basis and wrote the fundamental laws of judicial reform. In 1994, the president decided to streamline the situation and appointed Pashin head of the judicial reform department of the GPU. But then a scandal broke out - the management of the department was categorically against his appointment, and as a result Pashin was fired.

“Why didn’t you go to work in the Supreme Court instead of the Moscow City Court?” - a provincial human rights activist asked him in front of me. Because no one invited Pashin there. He worked in the Duma, taught, wrote, and in 1996 Yeltsin appointed him a trial judge in the Moscow City Court. There, he immediately did not develop a relationship with the chairman of the court, Zoya Korneva. Accordingly, he was fired from the Moscow City Court - twice. Judges are dismissed not by the chairman of the court, but by the qualifications board, but there Pashin also did not particularly try to please. He turned his first trial into a discussion of systematic violations of procedure by the Moscow City Court; As a result, not only Pashin lost his powers, but also another judge, Vladimir Mironov, the only one who supported Pashin’s accusations against the court’s leadership. Moreover, hardly anyone doubted that Pashin was telling the truth: a recent study by the International Bar Association showed that practically not a single hearing in any Moscow court takes place without violations. Pashin, in particular, argued that judges of the Moscow City Court release people's assessors before the court announces a decision, that is, they actually make a decision on their own. Who would doubt that. The entire institution of people's assessors has long existed in violation of the law (in particular, people's assessors actually work in courts on a permanent basis, although the law requires them to be involved in participation in processes only occasionally).


With his wife Olga, daughter Lena and father Anatoly Ivanovich. (Photo from family archive)

The second trial, already this year, Pashin tried to turn into a discussion of the corruption of the qualification board. She dealt with him quickly. “This only demonstrates the state of the qualification board,” sums up Pashin. And this is not a matter of Pashin’s self-confidence - his colleagues in the reformist camp agree with him.

The fact that these people love and respect Pashin is the best proof of his originality. Because he is incredibly tactless towards them. When I tell him that Sergei Vitsin, despite everything, expressed some optimism about the prospects for judicial reform, Pashin replies: “Well, yes, official optimism. Do you know that Vitsin is a general of the Ministry of Internal Affairs?” I know. I also know that Vitsin is his friend.

I inform him of Vitsin’s arguments: after all, the introduction of administrative and magistrate courts is foreseen. Pashin gets irritated. Administrative courts, according to the bill issued by the Supreme Court, are some kind of elite courts, “troikas” of the most qualified judges who will consider the most “important” cases. This, according to Pashin, means that “unimportant” judges and their cases will turn into “a gray mass abandoned to the mercy of fate.” Considering the shortage of judges in general - according to Pashin, there are now about 800 judicial vacancies in the country - the creation of an institution of justices of the peace is, as he put it, “degeneration”: courts will appear where decisions will be made by people with even lower qualifications than current judges. And those, as Pashin claims, for the most part are former court secretaries who completed their studies in absentia. Of the approximately 15 thousand Russian judges, he reports, only about 60 are candidates of science. He, naturally, was one of them. Yes, there is also a doctor of sciences, the chairman of the Supreme Court, Vyacheslav Lebedev, but Pashin, immediately snorting something unflattering about his dissertation, emphasizes that he defended himself while already being the chairman.

One could assume that Pashin has a good attitude towards the Constitutional Court: after all, among the judges there are his like-minded people, and in fact, over the last four years, all progress in the field of legal reform has occurred thanks to the decisions of the Constitutional Court. For example, two years ago the Constitutional Court actually banned death sentences in all corners of Russia, concluding that since the Constitution guarantees the right to a jury trial, and this right is not feasible in all regions, no court has the right to impose capital punishment. At the hearing of the Constitutional Court, Pashin acted as an expert and bluntly stated that a jury trial is the only court capable of administering justice. Do you think he was delighted with the court's decision? He's outraged! After all, the plaintiffs, he believes, were not seeking the abolition of death sentences, but their right to stand trial by jury. “The court’s decision effectively moved jury trials from an immediate right to a right that operates at the discretion of superiors,” he explains.

And so on. All the sensational “liberal” decisions of the Constitutional Court, according to Pashin, are half-hearted, cowardly measures of people who are trying to get the job done and not to annoy the authorities too much. At the same time, Pashin is not a revolutionary: he is simply a rare person in Russia who is deeply convinced that reforms cannot be carried out according to the principle of “one step forward, half a step back.” Which does not at all indicate excessive radicalism. But precisely because of this obvious need for Pashin to constantly move forward, his presence in the corridors of any kind of power - whether executive or judicial - can only be tolerated in relatively liberal times. Pashin was fired - a step back. They restored Pashin - half a step forward. This time it is unlikely that they will be reinstated, although Pashin, of course, filed an appeal. “They’ll devour them,” he predicts himself. “What should I do? I’m tired of them. I’ll teach.” And he adds: “It’s sad that it all ended so quickly.”


The former judge of the Moscow City Court has been deprived of his powers for the second time, but Pashin is energetic, smart, talented, knows his worth, and he will not sit idle. (Photo: Pavel Gorshkov )