IT'S ALL ABOUT THE HAT

POWER AND PEOPLE

The conference "Partnerships of Human Rights Organizations" was held in Russia for the first time. It was attended by more than a dozen law societies providing legal assistance to the population. The Public Verdict Foundation acted as the organizer of the conference....

The conference "Partnerships of Human Rights Organizations" was held in Russia for the first time. It was attended by more than a dozen law societies providing legal assistance to the population. The Public Verdict Foundation acted as the organizer of the conference.

In the conference hall of the Rossiya Hotel, only "their own" people discussed human rights issues - representatives of non-governmental human rights organizations of the country, independent experts in the field of legal and judicial law. This time there were more than enough participants: the Moscow Helsinki Group, the INDEM Foundation, the New Drug Policy Alliance, the Institute of Human Rights, the Memorial Foundation and other important human rights structures. All the efforts of the organization were taken over by the Public Verdict Foundation. About 100 people from regional human rights groups and a few Muscovites received invitations.

Over the past year, the courts heard: 5 million civil cases, 1 million criminal cases, 3 million administrative offenses, 1 million materials. "Materials" is the consideration of permits for tapping telephones, apartments, houses; permission for forced placement in psychiatric dispensaries, etc.

“The judicial system,” the well-known lawyer Sergei Pashin began his speech, “is a large assembly line, a large enterprise for the production of completed cases. And who is doing these things? Look! Former secretaries of the court, people without higher education, fed by the state and afraid of losing their jobs. The judge has no personality. The judicial institute is like a beehive with bees. Each bee only serves the uterus ... ".

Sergei Pashin sharply opposed the inquisitorial draft Code of Criminal Procedure, which has already earned the ardent support of human rights activists and the displeasure of judges and prosecutors. At one time, Pashin's speeches on jury trials, his mock trials at conferences of human rights activists, were a great success. But Pashin became "a black sheep in the judicial flock", and the qualification board of judges of Moscow deprived him of his judicial powers. Formally - for procedural violations, but according to many human rights activists - for his reformist activities. Now Sergey Anatolyevich is a professor at the Department of Criminal Law Disciplines of the MIEPP.

“It has become simply dangerous for personnel serving the government to make honest decisions and act according to the law. An honest judge is instantly out of a job, a dishonest one sits out his term in his chair, and the victims of arbitrariness go to prison. In the Russian legal system, an honest decision is like a fly agaric: it is edible, but only once,” Pashin said.

All human rights activists noted the special long-suffering of their fellow citizens. There is a crisis situation in Russia, there is more and more lawlessness among the authorities, but the society keeps calm. Human rights activists tend to see the reason in the lack of objective coverage of police activities in the Russian media. People believe that the arbitrariness of the police is a completely normal practice for Russia. Nobody is interested in how Dukalis beats a bad uncle with a butt and that this uncle can hardly be an innocent victim of a policeman. “People are just sure that everything is going right,” said Natalya Taubina, head of the Public Verdict Foundation.

Lev Levinson, an expert at the Institute of Human Rights and head of the New Drug Policy Alliance, began with a story:

“Last December, a young girl threw herself off the balcony of the ninth floor. Prior to that, drug control officers worked on it, taking it on the street with a small dose. She agreed to cooperate with them after three days of "exhortations". Came home and committed suicide. Here are the methods.

He said that since the establishment of the State Drug Control Service, drugs have been confiscated from the population every day, like potatoes. The numbers are fantastic and, it would seem, should indicate the need for a new structure. However, Levinson suggests that this amount of drugs in the country says only one thing: drugs are being planted. They are withdrawn from the bottomless safes of the State Drug Control Service and returned there - for statistics.

“If earlier one drug addict fed one colonel and two operas, now he feeds four colonels and a dozen operas,” said Levinson.

Sociologist Yuri Levada read out the figures. “In January of this year, the value of the arbitrariness index again returned to its highest level in July,” he noted. Yuri Alexandrovich was not ready to explain this fact: "Either this is a change in the situation in the country, or there have been changes in the minds of people."

Levada summed up the research activities of the analytical center on police arbitrariness. Levada noted that he did not aim to denigrate the situation - he simply stated the facts obtained from the studies. Muscovites are the most concerned, every third teenager has encountered the police, in 51% of cases the authorities use the police to counter their political opponents... Only 2% of people trust the police... Comment from the audience:

“These two percent are the cops themselves.