Twice two

The Supreme Court examined the contradictions in the law on employment and the rules for registering the unemployed

Despite the optimistic reports of the Ministry of Health and Social Development, which for several weeks in a row has noted a slight decrease in the flow of Russians registering with employment services, the Supreme Court decided that the unemployed are a category of citizens that needs, if not special protection from administrative pressure, then at least requiring delicate handling. Yesterday, Supreme Court Judge Nikolai Romanenkov upheld the complaint of one of the unemployed, who demanded to be relieved of the need to re-register at the labor exchange more than twice a month in order to maintain social benefits. According to the press secretary of the Supreme Court Pavel Odintsov, yesterday only the resolution part of the verdict on the complaint against the 19th point of the Government’s Procedure for Registration of Unemployed Citizens was announced. “The claim is fully satisfied,” stated Mr. Odintsov. The reasoning part, which will explain what guided the judge in making it easier for more than two million Russians to communicate with officials (according to the Ministry of Health and Social Development, as of April 21, the number of registered unemployed Russians amounted to 2,195,933 people), will be announced later.

However, remarkable knowledge of jurisprudence was probably not required from the judge. By and large, the plaintiff only asked to confirm the supremacy of the law over the normative acts of executive authorities, even the supreme bodies of the federation. The fact is that there were discrepancies in two documents - the law on employment and the government decree regulating the registration of unemployed citizens. The law obliges every unemployed person applying for benefits from the state to appear at the employment center for re-registration no more than twice a month. And the government document contains a requirement “to undergo re-registration within the time limits established by the employment authorities, but at least twice a month.” A government decree issued back in 1997, however, allowed officials to make concessions: if the situation on the labor market of a particular region was considered “tense,” the unemployed could re-register “at least once a month.”

The very appearance of this lawsuit indicates that employment service employees used this discrepancy to impose unnecessary administrative pressure on already stressed people who had lost their jobs: they could lose their benefits, for example, for failing to show up for the third time within a month. True, it was not just an ordinary unemployed person who reached the Supreme Court, but the famous Ural lawyer from the public association “Sutyazhnik” Anton Burkov. As the Sutyazhnik-Press agency reported, not without malice, last year, a candidate of legal sciences according to the Russian version and a doctor of jurisprudence according to Cambridge Burkov was forced in August last year to register with the employment center of the Verkh-Isetsky district of Yekaterinburg after it became clear that the state does not need his services as a specialist in international law. But in his hometown he was offered, for example, to consider a vacancy as a plasterer. After the refusal, he was given an allowance of 997 rubles. 50 kopecks per month and, like other officially recognized unemployed citizens, were required to undergo re-registration. In November, he re-registered twice, but officials still suspended the payment of benefits “due to the citizen’s failure to fulfill the obligation to re-register as an unemployed person within the time limits established by clause 19 of the Procedure for registering unemployed citizens.”

“Being unemployed” allowed Anton Burkov to once again remind the authorities of himself as a successful lawyer, and at the same time of the Sutyazhnik association, which defends the rights of citizens in disputes with bureaucrats. By appealing to the Supreme Court, the plaintiffs wanted to focus attention on the fact that the actions of employees of employment services, guided not by the law, but by a government decree, can, without proper grounds, deprive the unemployed of their only source of livelihood - benefits provided by the state. It is noteworthy that the position of the complainants was also supported by representatives of the Prosecutor General's Office. As the Sutyazhnik-Press agency reported yesterday, on the advice of representatives of the supervisory agency, the plaintiffs who won the trial are preparing an application to recover legal costs in the amount of 37 thousand rubles from the government of the Russian Federation.

Fedor SEREBRYANSKY