Themselves with the ships

The question of the legitimacy of the elections should be decided by the representatives of citizens - as follows from Article 32 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation

The political crisis of the summer of 2019 is a crisis of the legitimacy of the authorities in general and the judiciary in the first place. The courts, being drawn into the practice of making unbiased decisions, went to him for many years, and the executive branch, condoning corruption in the judicial system (in a broad sense, including the so-called law enforcement agencies), saw in an obedient court a panacea against the “orange revolutions”.

I share the opinion that the revolutionary path is disastrous, but there is no alternative to it when society and the state are deprived of an impartial arbiter in those conflicts that inevitably arise between their interests.

Therefore, the main guarantee against violence is an independent court.

In a state of law (even if it is “legal” only for decency), “truth” is not the declarations of the presidents or the statements of any other representatives of the executive branch, but only the decisions of the courts that have entered into legal force. Such, in legal terms, is the presumption of the truth of a judgment. But a presumption is only an assumption that can be refuted by the facts.

The problem is in the concept of “truth”, in the coincidence or mismatch between 1) truth as the correspondence of court decisions to facts and 2) “truth” as that which is only de jure proclaimed as such in a court decision. It is unlikely that in any of the historical states these two "truths" coincided 100 percent, but the coefficient of legitimacy of power can be expressed with a minus sign as a gap between them.

We know a lot of court decisions accumulated in recent years that raise doubts in public opinion. The “pupation” of the judiciary, squeezing out the institution of the jury and any manifestations of the fact that paragraph 5 of Article 32 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation guarantees citizens the right to participate in the administration of justice, strengthens our doubts.

The distrust of candidates in the elections to the Moscow City Duma to the courts of the capital is so great that none of them even appealed against the refusal to register signatures along this line. This judicial impasse led thousands of Muscovites to Tverskaya.

Concerned, like any citizen, about the danger of public unrest and retaliatory violence from “law enforcement agencies”, I proposed a draft statement to the Council under the President of the Russian Federation for the development of civil society and human rights, which was not supported by the majority of the HRC members as “too unrealistic”. Of course, more private goals can be pursued, which the Council, according to the assurances of its chairman, will do. In fact, most HRC members are afraid to look “frivolous” in the eyes of officials, but this prospect does not scare me: after all, what looks like a utopia today may turn out to be desperately needed tomorrow - as a model for legitimately resolving social conflicts that are unlikely to be quickly resolved. decline.

The following is a draft statement that was sympathized but not supported by the majority of HRC members:

“A public lie, no matter how it is motivated and justified from the point of view of the power that allows it, historically never leads to good. For almost a quarter of a century, since the 1996 presidential elections, elections at all levels in Russia have been mixed up on big and small lies. Over and over again, the judiciary, engaged by the executive branch, gave these lies the status of "truth that has entered into legal force", destroying trust in the political sphere. Sooner or later, this could not but lead to a crisis of the legitimacy of the authorities in general and the judiciary in particular.

During the registration of candidates for the elections (not the most important from the point of view of the country’s future) of municipal deputies in the summer of 2019 in Moscow, the gap between real reality and the simulacrum of “officially approved reality” reached the proportions of the abyss into which the entire Russian statehood could collapse. The impossibility of obtaining the truth in the bodies of the Central Executive Committee and in court forced thousands of Muscovites to take to the streets. This is an extremely dangerous situation, fraught with violence on both sides, and the only way out of it, restoring confidence in the authorities, can only be the way back to the truth, but it must be established in a strict procedural way.

The Central Election Commission and its bodies, as well as the courts, unfortunately, no longer enjoy the confidence of citizens, and their decisions will not be able to convince voters of anything. Understanding the need for a legal and non-violent procedure for resolving this conflict, we propose, based on Article 32 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation, which guarantees the right of citizens to participate in the administration of justice, to conduct an open count of signatures submitted by Muscovites for the registration of all candidates for the 2019 municipal elections, with the participation of collegium formed by voters on the model of a jury trial and in compliance with all guarantees of openness and publicity of justice.