| Valery Zorkin told the president about the nature of appeals to the Constitutional Court Chairman of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation Valery Zorkin was invited to the Kremlin yesterday. Meetings with President Vladimir Putin have long become regular - several times a year the heads of the highest courts pay a visit to the head of state. However, one cannot help but notice that Mr. Zorkin’s conversation with Mr. Putin took place on the eve of an important discussion in the Constitutional Court. In November, the Constitutional Court is set to make a decision on the constitutionality of the abolition of direct elections of governors, the most important political project for the Kremlin. And the authorities have already begun some artillery preparation for the upcoming proceedings - Speaker of the Federation Council Sergei Mironov unexpectedly revived what seemed to be a long-forgotten project of transferring the Constitutional Court from Moscow to St. Petersburg.
However, even if these issues were discussed yesterday at the meeting of the Constitutional Court chairman with the president, the parties did not want to share information about the progress of the discussion. According to official reports, Valery Zorkin only told the president about his everyday work, saying that the court receives 15 thousand complaints annually, a significant part of which are related to the operation of the Criminal Procedure Code.
For the Constitutional Court, editing the Code of Criminal Procedure has indeed long been one of the main areas of “creativity”. It was through the efforts of judges that the old code, having undergone a serious update, was adapted to existing constitutional standards. However, to the surprise of the judges, even after the adoption of the new Code of Criminal Procedure, their criminal procedural work did not decrease. According to Mr. Zorkin, “the proportion of complaints related to the Criminal Procedure Code is still large.” “This is strange, since the Code of Criminal Procedure is modern,” he marveled. However, with the adoption of the new Code of Criminal Procedure, the nature of complaints has seriously changed. If previously dissatisfaction with the norms of the code was expressed mainly by defendants and accused, now criticism comes from victims. “There (in the code. - Ed. ) there are some significant flaws, especially regarding the protection of crime victims,” says the Chairman of the Constitutional Court. “By focusing on protecting defendants, the procedural code has forgotten about the victims of crimes.”
Recently, the Constitutional Court has already taken several steps to establish procedural balance. Thus, the Constitutional Court allowed the case to be returned for further investigation if “there were significant violations of the law that cannot be corrected in court proceedings, if the return of the case is not related to making up for the incompleteness of the investigation.” And in May, he made a decision allowing the cancellation of an acquittal or too lenient verdict that had entered into force. The developer of the Code of Criminal Procedure, Elena Mizulina, called this resolution “a step back 50 years.” However, the Constitutional Court itself is confident that this creates an opportunity to correct judicial errors. At the same time, the court found that review of such verdicts is possible only within a year from the moment they enter into force and only in case of the most flagrant violations of the law committed by a lower authority.
Another topic that was raised during the open part of the presidential-judicial meeting was the stability of legislation. The judges are confident that frequent and not always necessary amendments to laws undermine the country's legal system. That is why they oppose amendments to the Constitution, believing that many emerging issues can be resolved in federal constitutional laws and in decisions of the Constitutional Court on the interpretation of the Constitution. “A strong regulatory and legislative framework has been created in the state, the role of the courts is increasing in terms of interpreting legislation in law enforcement practice,” says Valery Zorkin. Yuri KOLESOV |
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