29,406 pages contains a decree of the government of the Tula region of 2016

The Russian bureaucracy produces increasingly voluminous documents - “cyclops laws”. Denis Savelyev, a researcher at the Institute for Law Enforcement Problems, explains this trend not by the complexity of the content, but by the desire of legislators to “formalize any action in order to gain the illusion of control.”

The government of the Tula region issued a resolution of 29,406 pages - “On approval of the results of the state cadastral valuation of real estate in the Tula region.” about this and other examples of “cyclops laws.” writes Denis Savelyev, a researcher at the Institute of Law Enforcement Problems (IEP) at the European University in St. Petersburg,

Savelyev calls “cyclops laws” regulatory documents containing thousands and tens of thousands of pages. He notes that this is not about complicating the content of legal acts, but about the use in their text of various tables and lists borrowed from government databases.

The first “cyclops law” published in electronic form on the official legal information portal pravo.gov.ru was the 2012 budget, which took up about 4,000 pages. In the same year, a 5,500-page protocol on Russia's accession to the WTO was prepared.

Regional authorities publish “cyclops laws” of even greater volume. According to Savelyev, the most massive documents are those relating to the assessment of the cadastral value of objects; their volume ranges from 15,000 to 35,000 pages.

The researcher calculated that printing out the 2016 government decree of the Tula region (which is necessary for the official signing of the document) took 59 packs of paper with a total weight of approximately 169 kg. “Taking into account the fact that the law is published in graphic form, where searching the text is impossible, there is little practical benefit from such an official publication,” Savelyev states. Thus, in one of the tables of the decree, more than 100 thousand lines are occupied by solid numbers - cadastral numbers and the cost of objects.

However, it is not only new documents that demonstrate a tendency to increase in volume; already adopted laws continue to grow due to amendments. In the original edition of Part One of the Civil Code from 1994 there were 46,000 words, in the latest edition from July 2017 - already 80,000.

The transition to publishing legal acts in electronic form freed legislators from any restrictions on volume and contributed significantly to the growth of lawmaking costs, Savelyev concludes.

“And most importantly, the growth in the volume of legislative mass indicates the legislator’s fear of law enforcement - that it will be misunderstood, that it will be implemented “wrong.” The same is true for executive authorities that adopt by-laws: this is the desire to formalize any action in order to gain the illusion of control and insure their responsibility to their superiors,” the scientist concludes.

Source: Institute for Law Enforcement Problems .