Translated material
Task for the Ministry of Justice
Former prosecutors will answer for the offended Russians before the Strasbourg court
The administration of the President of the Russian Federation will no longer answer to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) for humiliated and insulted citizens. Yesterday, Vladimir Putin signed a decree transferring this function to the Ministry of Justice. At the same time, by his decree, the president relieved Pavel Laptev from his previously occupied post of Commissioner of the Russian Federation at the ECHR and appointed Vladimir Ustinov’s former colleague from work in the Prosecutor General’s Office, 38-year-old Veronica Milinchuk, to it.Thus, it became clear that Mr. Laptev’s resignation, which began to be talked about a week ago, is not at all connected with the fact that he was losing cases in Strasbourg (in this regard , no claims were made against him ), but with the fact that The presidential administration, it seems, is simply tired of bearing the burden of responsibility for other government agencies against which accusations of violating the rights and freedoms of Russians are brought. Now the Ministry of Justice will deal with this. And now the head of this department, Vladimir Ustinov, will have to answer in Strasbourg himself for everyone he imprisoned while he was Prosecutor General, and for everyone who is now in prisons and colonies, which, as is known, are under the jurisdiction of his current ministry. In particular, for Mikhail Khodorkovsky , whom Mr. Ustinov imprisoned, whom he now feeds with government cabbage soup and who also filed complaints against the Russian authorities with the ECHR.
The news of Mr. Laptev's resignation, citing certain sources in Strasbourg, appeared early last week. There were no official comments on this, but many media outlets then for some reason explained this by saying that the commissioner allegedly did not cope well with his duties - he lost too many cases in the ECHR. However, this is not in the slightest degree true.
As the Vremya Novostei newspaper has already reported , of all the complaints that have been filed by Russians since May 1998 to the ECHR (and there are about 50 thousand of them), only 0.4% have been satisfied. Mr. Laptev was accused of losing 1.3 million euros to the country's budget because of these lost cases, although this amount seems large only at first glance - any mansion on Rublyovka is worth more. Nevertheless, the commissioner took all cases when the Strasbourg court convicted the Russian authorities of certain violations more than seriously, and together with colleagues from the Supreme Court, the prosecutor's office, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Federal Penitentiary Service and other structures, many legal, law enforcement and law enforcement reforms were carried out systems There are many examples of this. Thus, all prisons and colonies moved from the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the FSB to the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Justice, which was supposed to reduce the ability of investigative authorities to put pressure on prisoners. And the so-called “eyelashes” were removed from the prison windows - fixed iron blinds that practically did not allow sunlight into the cells, and in Europe this is equated to torture and inhumane treatment. The buildings themselves of many (though not yet all) prisons, by the way, were reconstructed and repaired in accordance with European standards, largely thanks to the personal efforts of Mr. Laptev, and that same famous “Vladimir Central” is now considered one of the most exemplary prisons in Europe.
Torture itself, or, as they are otherwise called, “unacceptable methods of conducting investigations,” which, alas, are still used in our state, also received the widest public response, largely thanks to the European Court, where victims of police brutality turned to for protection. After one of the most scandalous rulings of the ECHR in the case “Mikheev v. Russia” (when a young man tortured during interrogation by operatives jumped out of a window and remained permanently disabled), the Minister of Internal Affairs, after consulting with the commissioner, ordered all police officers to read the court ruling and sign that that they have drawn appropriate conclusions. As Larisa Brycheva, the presidential aide and head of the administration’s public legal department, noted in one of her reports, one of the most difficult categories of Russian cases in the ECHR was precisely improper conditions of detention, as well as unfounded court orders of arrest. And in this regard, at the beginning of the year, the Chairman of the Supreme Court, Vyacheslav Lebedev, asked his colleagues to check all the cases where the courts made arrests, and the prosecutor’s office then, by its decision, released the accused. And Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika constantly reminds his subordinates that all requests for arrest must be carefully motivated.
The second global problem that “surfaced” thanks to the ECHR and which the Vremya Novostei newspaper has repeatedly written about is the massive failure to comply with court decisions related to social non-payments - salaries for teachers and doctors, pensions, benefits for Chernobyl survivors. Despite the fact that the courts ordered citizens to pay what they were owed, the funds were almost never found in the budget, and thus the state debt, which has been accumulating since the mid-90s, has increased enormously and now amounts to billions of rubles. Beginning in December, with the participation of the Commissioner, meetings were held in all federal districts with their leadership in order to develop ways to solve this difficult problem.
By the way, Pavel Laptev has repeatedly sharply criticized the European Court itself and even compared it with the actions of the NKVD in 1937, due to the fact that the ECHR, when rejecting complaints, often does not bother to explain the reasons for making such decisions. In addition, the commissioner accused Strasbourg of being politicized and having a biased attitude towards Russia.
In fact, Pavel Laptev completed his work on Tuesday. He sent a demand to the ECHR to speed up the consideration of the case “Kononov v. Latvia”. This is the complaint of 84-year-old pensioner, anti-fascist partisan Vasily Kononov, who was convicted by a Latvian court of murdering citizens during the Second World War, although he himself claims that he executed Nazi collaborators, as was always done in war.
Yesterday, Vladimir Putin, by decree, appointed a new commissioner to the ECHR. Or rather, the authorized one - Candidate of Legal Sciences Veronica Milinchuk, who until now held the position of deputy director of the Research Institute for Strengthening Law and Order under the Prosecutor General's Office. Ms. Milinchuk graduated from Moscow State University in 1992, and from the Faculty of Law of Kuban State University in 1994. From 2001 to February 2006, she worked in various senior positions in the international legal department of the Prosecutor General's Office. Now she will return to her former boss Vladimir Ustinov. Yesterday, the President signed another decree entitled “Issues of ensuring the activities of the Commissioner of the Russian Federation at the European Court of Human Rights,” according to which this function is now assigned to the Ministry of Justice, and its head is instructed to create an office of the Commissioner within the structure of his department. As the presidential press service said in a statement, “such a decision will help improve the efficiency of the commissioner’s activities, since in accordance with the presidential decree of October 13, 2004, the task of ensuring the protection of human and civil rights and freedoms is entrusted to the Ministry of Justice.” The position of the Commissioner itself, according to the decree, is equivalent to the position of Deputy Minister of Justice. Yesterday the Ministry of Justice did not comment on the appearance of a new function in their department.
But former Commissioner Pavel Laptev was not left without a job. There is no exact information about the location of his new service yet, but, as sources told Vremya Novostey, its essence will boil down to “legal support for the production of aircraft, ships and agricultural reform.”