Translated material
Justice on credit
The Russian judicial system will receive $170 million for development
The Russian government allocated $120 million from the treasury for a program to support judicial reform, and another $50 million was provided as a loan by the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) for the same purposes. The recipients of these funds are the Constitutional Court, the Supreme Arbitration Court and the Judicial Department of the Supreme Court. The goal of the project is “increasing the openness and efficiency of the judicial system,” and quite a lot is included in it - from public opinion polls, conducting various syntheses and analyzes of increasing the openness and transparency of the judicial system to introducing the most modern information technologies into it, publications “100 % of all court decisions online.”However, as Vremya Novostey learned, representatives of the Russian Themis initially perceived the money that fell on their heads quite skeptically, since they already had sad experience of similar loans behind them. Several years ago, under a similar program, some foreign companies that won tenders decided to simply profit from loan funds - they held a couple of seminars, paying their lecturers $7 thousand a day, traveled around the country in expensive coupes, lived in 6-star hotels, and as their reports on the work done, they provided materials to the IBRD that were actually prepared by employees of the judicial department, and not at the expense of any loans, but for their salaries. Then it was decided to refuse such “help”, which did not bring any real results, except for the expenses for “dear guests”, and the money given on credit nevertheless had to be returned.
The judicial system and judicial reform are financed through federal target programs, the latter designed for 2007-2011. It includes issues of material support for courts, repair and construction of buildings, increasing salaries for judges and court staff, the creation of an institute of justices of the peace, as well as the State Automated System “Justice”, which is designed to cover absolutely all courts of general jurisdiction with a single information network, create websites for each of them, where information about the court, its activities, as well as the decisions it makes on cases would be published, use video conferencing to conduct trials, and much more.
Openness and transparency of the judicial system were also one of the goals of the Federal Target Program, which gave rise, in particular, to the adoption of the federal law “On Citizens’ Access to Information about the Activities of the Judicial System.” Already, almost all courts of the constituent entities of the federation have their own websites and many of their own press secretaries.
An agreement on a loan of $50 million between the Russian Federation and the World Bank was signed back in July 2007. And last year, competitions were announced among various companies to see who would best help develop judicial reform. Among the lots up for grabs are the provision of services for organizing and conducting training to improve the qualifications of arbitration court employees and the provision of services for converting old decisions and documents of the Supreme Court into electronic form. (This includes scanning the archives of the RSFSR Armed Forces and the RF Armed Forces, decisions and cases, respectively 1,200,000 and 270,000 sheets of A4 format; business card file of the USSR Armed Forces 300,000 cards of A5 format; alphabetical card index of supervisory proceedings of the Military Collegium of the USSR Armed Forces 900,000 cards of A6 format ; alphabetical card index of the first instance of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR 45,000 A5 cards; indexing of scanned documents, entering the results into the database.)
In addition, competitors must propose their ideas for conducting social research characterizing citizens’ attitudes towards the judicial system; to conduct scientific analysis and systematize court decisions of the Constitutional Court and the legal positions adopted by it, quotes and comments; for the supply and installation of an integrated document management system and an automated system for posting information in an Internet portal (document management system, servers, storage system, tape library, SAN director, hierarchical data storage system, mobile workstations, UPS, terminals, printing equipment, software).
Many of the proposals made by companies to Themis representatives surprised the latter, to put it mildly. Thus, it was completely incomprehensible to them why they should spend money on establishing contacts with the press, if such contacts have existed and worked for a long time. Or why involve third-party companies to create a unified electronic network for courts if the Voskhod Research Institute has already created the State Automated System “Justice”. As sources in the judiciary told Vremya Novostei, the fear was too strong that behind all this prosperity there were “disservices” at a minimum and “budget misappropriation” by various companies at a maximum.
But the loan has been received and cannot be refused. In addition, in a crisis, if there is a possible need to sequester the budget, federal target programs will be among the first to be cut. Therefore, representatives of Themis decided to specify themselves why they needed this money, since it was given to them. Thus, the Judicial Department (JD) under the Supreme Court put forward a number of proposals on how, with the help of a loan, the work of courts of general jurisdiction could be improved. At the same time, the SD emphasizes that all this can be done through the federal target program, but only much more slowly.
The Vremya Novostey Board of Directors named several areas that are in dire need of additional financial injections. For example, this is the use of video conferencing in civil proceedings - for questioning witnesses and parties located in different cities (now the law allows such “teleconferences” only when appealing sentences in criminal cases). In addition, this is the introduction of special barcodes in court records that would allow, as in supermarkets, cases to be read and transferred to a common database. With the help of additional funding, it would also be possible to inform the magistrates' courts, which are not yet connected to the general system of the State Automated System "Justice", to keep video records of court hearings, which would reduce to virtually nothing all disputes about what actually happened in them, and besides would discipline all participants in the process.
The witness protection program, according to representatives of Themis, also needs to be improved - the creation of a special program for changing voices, which could turn a male voice into a female one and even give it an accent. Courts of general jurisdiction, in addition, would not refuse assistance in creating electronic archives of their cases. Some of them still need the construction of guard rooms, since due to their absence, arrested defendants are forced to wait for the trial while sitting in a paddy wagon, and this, they say in the SD, is completely unacceptable.
The negotiation process on how best to use the loan was in full swing and, according to our sources, was difficult, but productive. We have already managed to convince the organizers of the competition that the courts know better what exactly they need money for, and that it is much more profitable, in the interests of the most effective results of judicial reform, to give priority to those who have been working in this area for a long time.