Surging feelings

Bailiffs in Yaroslavl exacted 50,000 rubles from one lady for offensive words written about her rival on a social network. Unfortunately for the unrestrained defendant, the “victim” not only slept with her husband, but also had some professional litigation skills, which helped her win 50 thousand rubles. from a deceived wife. Success inspired the winner:

“The woman who was insulted categorically refused to talk about this sensitive matter, but advised everyone who finds herself in her place to contact either the police to initiate a criminal case, or a lawyer to bring the boors to justice in civil proceedings.”

For a moment, I tried to imagine what would happen to the Motherland and to us if the advice of the nameless huntress for other people’s husbands was accepted and put into practice by fellow citizens. I’ll look at one simple example, directly from current practice.

In this magazine, 665,728 comments have been added over the 11 years of its existence. I’m a peaceful guy, I don’t participate in any domestic or commercial conflicts, I don’t have enemies (or at least I don’t know anything about them). The lion's share of offensive comments in my LiveJournal are left by people who do not know me personally, who have seen me at best on TV (or even have no idea what I look like), for whom leaving such remarks is simply a way to express disagreement with my views, beliefs or assessments of the surrounding reality. Let’s add here full-time United Russia propagandists who earn a penny from the same type of political shit in discussions with popular bloggers, and imagine that the share of offensive comments in my LiveJournal accounts for a modest 1% of the total mass of reader comments.

This means that if I decided to follow the advice of the Yaroslavl litigator, I would need to initiate 6657 criminal (for libel) and/or civil (for the protection of honor and dignity) court cases. Let us further imagine that the consideration of each of them would cost the Russian law enforcement system a paltry 10 man-hours by its standards (not counting possible cassation proceedings and the use of the bailiff service to execute decisions if they turn out to be in my favor). In total, for the legal assessment of 1% of comments in my LiveJournal alone, the law enforcement and judicial departments of the Russian Federation would have to spend 665,700 working man-hours, which, with a 40-hour work week, means 320 man-years of full-time employment (or 332, if you add 2 weeks of annual leave) . All these 320 man-years would have been wasted on a legal solution to an issue that objectively (in a private prosecution case, the only competent assessment of damage is my own) is not worth a damn.

It should be understood that the resources of the Russian law enforcement and judicial system are finite. They are paid from the state budget (from the same money that is chronically insufficient for the construction of roads, schools and hospitals), in order to solve completely real, non-fictional problems. Such as the suppression and prevention of all types of crimes, maintaining public order, protecting the rights of citizens, the interests of society and the state in various disputes, etc. And, frankly, I don’t have the feeling that the system copes with all these tasks in any decent way.

If even an insignificant part of bloggers and social network participants in Russia follows the advice of the Yaroslavl harlot and begins to flood courts and departments with the same type of lawsuits in the genre of “the kitty is offended and demands money,” the existing resources of the law enforcement and judicial system will be exhausted at lightning speed.

On paper, Russian legislation (as well as the laws of any other state) contains some barriers that protect the justice institutions from a barrage of insignificant, far-fetched claims. But these barriers, even in theory, are very illusory, and in practice, as both the Yaroslavl vaudeville show and the high-profile Pussy Riot case show, they do not work at all.

In fact, the fabricated “mental suffering” of the housekeeper, the salaried guard and the temple trader opens for the judicial system no less impressive Pandora’s box than the patent of Internet litigation based on remarks in forums.

As we remember, one law firm in Novosibirsk is already preparing a dozen of the same type of lawsuits with the wording: so downloaded the video on YouTube, watched it and was offended by 30,000 rubles . The speedy investigation of Judge Syrova demonstrated to the country and the world that not the slightest evidence is required from a kiso; it is enough to groan in the witness chair about your lost peace of mind - and you are already recognized as a victim in a criminal trial. By the way, the absentee “witness via YouTube” in Hamsud was also allowed to participate in the trial, in contrast to the real witnesses declared by the defense, who were present at the KhHS on February 21 and observed what was happening there with their own eyes. Another question is that in the verdict the testimony of this viewer was retrospectively left without consideration. But for some reason he was presented to the whole country and given a platform for ranting about the demonic nature - very similar to those that just found a place in the guilty verdict.

Probably, my sad predictions about the collapse of our entire flimsy quasi-legal system could be dismissed as a banal horror story, from which the system will be able to protect itself as soon as the threat assumes any serious proportions. But there is one problem, which I will probably talk about in a separate post in a while.

So to be continued...

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