The Moscow City Court terminates the powers of its chairman

The Qualification Board of Judges of Moscow received a proposal from the Chairman of the Moscow City Court, Olga Egorova, about the early termination of the powers of the Chairman of the Meshchansky District Court, Alexander Reket. A year and a half ago, he, an experienced military judge, was invited to organize the work of one of the oldest and most famous courts in the capital. Having received the reports of the commissions that inspected the Meshchansky Court last week and discovered that under the leadership of Mr. Reket, court cases were considered with great delay, reporting statistics were falsified, and almost half of the court employees were fired or quit themselves, Ms. Egorova called the work of the chairman “a failure " and asked to remove him from his position.

The reason for the unscheduled inspection of the Meshchansky Court, as Moscow City Court press secretary Anna Usacheva told Kommersant, was a sharp increase in the number of complaints against judges working there that were received on the official website of the Moscow City Court. If in 2009 67 people complained about them, then in 2010 there were already 90 dissatisfied. “Honorable” second (after the Tverskoy District Court) place in Moscow was taken by the Meshchansky Court and in terms of the number of complaints received against it by the qualification board of Moscow judges. As a result, in mid-March, the leadership of the Moscow City Court decided to find out what was the cause of the discontent and sent a commission to the district court.

The inspectors’ conclusions turned out to be disappointing for the employees of the Meshchansky Court and, first of all, for its head, the experienced military judge Alexander Reket. One of the main complaints of the inspectors against the Meshchansky Court was “systematic and massive judicial red tape,” which resulted in “gross violations of the rights and legitimate interests of the participants in the process,” as well as “diminishing the authority of the judiciary and undermining the prestige of the judicial profession.”

Inspectors, for example, were surprised to discover that the philistine judges worked rather slowly with citizens’ claims - as of March 14, claims filed on February 4 had not been accepted for proceedings, although by law the judge must decide on the application within a month. There was no rush at all to register civil cases that had already been considered in the Meshchansky Court - as it turned out, court decisions made back in the fall of last year were not transferred to the court office.

Since the fall, cassation complaints from citizens filed with the Moscow City Court through the Meshchansky District Court have also been kept in court. For example, citizen Efimov, who was rejected by the Meshchansky Court in his claim for reinstatement at work and filed a cassation appeal with the Moscow City Court on November 16, 2010, has still not received a decision. As it turned out, his complaint never even reached the office of the district court, and in general, “there is no information about any movement of it.” The inspection came to this conclusion.

Obviously, the employees of the civil office of the court also followed the example of the violating judges - they kept the registration and statistical cards of the cases considered carelessly, without filling out half of the columns and points required by law. Approximately according to the same pattern, as the inspection established, criminal and administrative cases were considered in the Meshchansky Court - the inspectors also noted “red tape” and delays made by judges when considering cases and formalizing the decisions made.

It is therefore not surprising that the Qualification Board of Judges of Moscow was literally inundated with complaints about “delays and unethical behavior of employees of the Meshchansky Court” - in 2010 they were received literally every working day, and in total there were 280 complaints.

According to the inspectors, the “failure” of the district court’s work was associated solely with miscalculations made by its head, Alexander Reket. As stated in Olga Egorova’s submission, the head of the Meshchansky Court, for example, pursued an incorrect personnel policy. The audit found that during his leadership, 48 court employees were fired, and of the 21 full-time positions of judges, only 15 remained occupied. At the same time, according to Ms. Egorova, only “due to the lack of organizational skills of the chairman” the selection of candidates for vacant positions there were no judges.

These same reasons, according to the inspectors, explain the uneven distribution of workload between judges, which they recorded in the Meshchansky Court. Criminal cases here are considered by 12 judges, while civil cases, of which there are many more, are entrusted to only three civil judges. At the same time, Alexander Reket himself, a judge in civil cases, apparently did not participate in their consideration at all - in any case, no cases with his participation could be found on the court’s website.

Finally, the last and, apparently, decisive argument that prompted the chairman of the Moscow City Court to appeal to the qualification board was the unethical behavior of Alexander Reket in relation to his management, expressed in falsification of reports. As was established by the audit, reporting for the past year, the chairman of the Meshchansky Court reported that as of January 1, 2011, his organization had 1,612 pending civil cases. This figure was included in the annual report of the Moscow Judicial Department and the analytical report of the Moscow City Court based on the results of work for 2010. Meanwhile, during the audit it was found that in fact, 2,407 civil cases remained in the Meshchansky Court at that time, and Mr. Reket simply transferred the “extra” 795 cases to the future. This procedure was done surprisingly simply and unpretentiously: from the registration and statistical cards it followed that the claim was filed and accepted for proceedings in 2010, and the registration number for the same case was assigned for 2011. “These kinds of ‘methods’ for improving performance are unacceptable and represent a vicious practice,” says Ms. Egorova’s submission.

Having thus motivated her position, the chairman of the Moscow City Court addressed the members of the qualification board with a proposal for the early termination of the powers of the chairman of the Meshchansky District Court, Alexander Reket. At the same time, Ms. Egorova especially emphasized that she was only asking for his removal from a leadership position, leaving Mr. Reket the right to remain a judge of the same Meshchansky or another court.

The fate of the chairman was supposed to be decided this coming Thursday - on this day, meetings of the qualification board are usually held, but yesterday it became known that the proceedings with the violator were postponed indefinitely. The fact is that yesterday Mr. Requet, as required by the procedure for summoning a judge to a meeting of the qualification board, received a call from one of its members, asking him to come and familiarize himself with the submitted submission. The chairman, as Kommersant was told in the qualification board, reacted to the invitation rather strangely - he hung up. An hour later it became known that Alexander Reket was “urgently hospitalized” with a heart attack immediately after this telephone conversation. His subordinates, in a conversation with Kommersant, said that they became aware of Olga Egorova’s presentation only yesterday, after their leader was taken to the hospital, and only he himself could comment on the claims made.

Sergey Mashkin

The Meshchansky Court successfully appealed