Chronicle of diving advocates

A bill is submitted to the State Duma, which can leave citizens defenseless. And all for the sake of money

The effectiveness of any civilian institution is determined by the degree of influence on the life of society, in other words - the coefficient of its useful action. There are no words - it would be pleasant to try on Pasternakovskoye: "We, poets, make an impression." But it will not work. 0.24% of the acquittals in the country (at best!) Do not greatly contribute to elegiac mentality. In developed, democratic legal systems, the share of excuses is about 15–25% percent, and even in the Stalin USSR, in the midst of repression, their number reached 10%. And the conversations in the spirit that we, lawyers, have nothing to do with it and that just life (power, courts and so on - choose to taste), here they help little. For the advocacy for itself, the advocacy as a thing in itself is a type of professional schizophrenia. And the role of a lawyer as a statist in the system of imitation justice is humiliating.

But it is not these problems that modern lawyer lives. And I'm afraid, the impression that the lawyer corporation makes in amazed citizens has long been determined by our unenviable role in trials. In recent years, they were marked not only by the internal corporate wars related to attempts by the lawyer general to perpetuate and bring their control over the “Lawyer Street” to the feudal level, but also with high -profile criminal cases related to corruption among lawyers.

And I am deeply sure that 0.24% of excuses and internal problems of the advocacy are two sides of the same medal.

The law on the advocacy adopted in 2002 said that the advocacy is on the principles of self -government, corporate and equality of ordinary lawyers. But in practice, lawyers completely independent, for example, the process of forming bodies of lawyer self -government. The procedure prescribed in the law of the so -called rotation of the Soviets of the federal and regional lawyer chambers turns the process of electing governing lawyer bodies into an unthinkable bureaucratic farce. So, according to the law of the President of the Federal Chamber of Lawyers, the FPA Council elects. And the candidates for members of the Council of the FPA to the lawyer congress, in practice, consisting entirely from the presidents of the lawyer chambers of regions, are offered exclusively from among those personally selected by the President of the FPA and approved by the same advice of the FPA. It turns out that the current president of the FPA appoints electors to himself. A similar model works at the regional level. And what is it, if not typical feudal-bureaucratic self-production?

I wanted to add - the reproduction of the "elite". But it doesn’t work out. Any closed, deprived of internal control, criticism and social elevators, living due to internal gutes (for us - lawyer contributions) the system inevitably degrades and goes into a self -service system.

Almost irremovable lawyers for the mass simply stopped walking on processes. Management became their profession, and the sweetest dream is the implementation of the concept of regulating the professional legal assistance market, according to which all legal consultants not covered by the lawyer, who are not part of legal units, will have to join the bar under the threat of prohibition of judicial practice. And such a statement of the question simply does not leave a choice before the “free legal consultants”.

More precisely, it leaves a purely dramatic choice: either to continue their activities in a lawyer guise, or to leave the profession.

Meanwhile, according to a survey of lawyers, in which more than 12.5 thousand people participated at the Right.ru information portal, only about 5% of the respondents spoke for a lawyer monopoly.

This is not surprising. The brightest example of reigning in the managerial environment of the lawyers of the morals was the Bashkir events known in our environment as “History of the mother -in -law of the apartment” and “The case of“ Witnesses of the Constitution ”. It all started with statements by a number of lawyers and lawyers to the Investigative Committee regarding the dubious transactions for the lease of the Bashkortostan Law Chamber of the premises belonging to the mother -in -law of the President of the Chamber. Along the way, the facts of a commercial bribery were revealed when assigning the status of a lawyer, which resulted in a conviction against one of the representatives of the republic’s law nomenclature. But the procedural decision on the main subject of circulation was not made for a long time. And then a group of famous Russian lawyers appealed to the chairman of the Investigative Committee with a request to ensure the objective and timely consideration of the application for financial and other abuses of representatives of the management bodies of the Bar of the Republic of Bashkortostan.

And then a grandiose scandal erupted. The IX All -Russian Congress of Lawyers adopted a resolution on compliance with the lawyer ethics, and the Council of the Federal Chamber of Lawyers of the Russian Federation approved special clarifications on the permissibility of the admission of lawyers to law enforcement agencies. The essence of these documents was reduced to direct - under the threat of bringing lawyers to disciplinary liability, up to deprivation of the right to a profession - a prohibition of lawyers to state authorities or law enforcement agencies demanding an audit against lawying authorities.

The rules of criminal communities with their “conceptual” prohibitions and taboos reminded many lawyers. "You can't knock on your own." To talk about the conformity of these decisions of the Constitution and the federal legislation that directly guarantees Russian citizens the right to appeal to state bodies and the inadmissibility of discrimination on social and professional features prohibiting the persecution of citizens in connection with such appeals is simply too. These documents are now appealed by the Lawyer Chamber of Udmurtia and a number of lawyers in the Khamovniki court of Moscow.

Even the slightly cleaned records of the congress posted to the FPA website give an idea of ​​what happened.

“Non -browned”, “close the mouth”, “lawyers are not citizens”, “go to the police work”, “denunciation” is only part of the cries of “colleagues” from the hall and from the stage.

And then the ironic "witnesses of the Constitution." This is about the signatures of the appeal, who dared to believe in the declaration of the Basic Law guaranteeing citizens the right to appeal to state bodies. Great. Now we will be called.

For information. To date, at the request of lawyers - members of the Application of the Republic of Bashkortost, a criminal case has been instituted on the grounds of a crime under Part 4 of Art. 159 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation on theft of funds from the budget of the Barring Chamber of the Republic of Bashkortostan, which is accepted for production.

For me personally, the described events were not a surprise.

Speaking at the previous VIII Congress of Lawyers, FPP President Yuri Pilipenko said Sacramental: "It is worth slowly orienting the lawyer community that freedom in this life is not the most important thing."

In my opinion, such a statement would not even honor the head of the license plate of the prison institution. At the same congress, scandalous amendments of the Code of Professional Ethics of Lawyers were adopted - lawyers “as forbidden” to appeal decisions on the termination of their status in court on any grounds not related to a violation of the procedure for making this decision.

I say “as it were” not by chance, since there was an outbreak. The courts did not respond to this illiterate and anti -constitutional rule -making, continuing to consider lawyers' claims on the merits. But the main achievements of the VIII Congress of Lawyers, undoubtedly, should be recognized as different. A quiet sapa in the Code of Law Ethics was amended, allowing lawyer officials to “extract income from other sources” and, which is especially touching (I quote literally), do this “ for example , from renting real estate (hire)”. And indeed, how to forget the main problem of domestic advocacy ...

And more recently, by the Council of the Barring Chamber of Bashkiria, under the leadership of the famous son -in -law of his mother -in -law, one of the signatures of his abuse, Andrei Kazakov, was deprived of the status of a lawyer for labor activities related ... with the breeding of donkeys and mules. Such priorities from the modern advocacy - management can be made from renting premises to their own lawyers, but lawyers who divorced donkeys will be deprived of status. Disciplinary proceedings were instituted at other signatures of the “witnesses of the Constitution”. One of them, Vasily Shavin, was not miraculously deprived of the status - the voice for depriving the right to profession and warning in the Council of the Law Chamber of the Nizhny Novgorod region were divided exactly in half.

The other day, the State Duma Committee on State Building and Legislation approved the coordinated amendments of the Federal Law on amendments to the Law on Bar activities. A number of amendments can only be welcomed. Lawyers will have the right to offer candidates for the Council of the Chamber of Lawyers. The regional and Federal Chamber of Lawyers will be obliged to publish information on the annual financial statements adopted by the Councils of these chambers by decisions, the transactions of the chambers, in which there is an interest in the members of the Soviets. All this is good.

But the bill contains a number of provisions, the adoption of which will put both on the lawyer, and in general at the independent profession of a lawyer and just a lawyer a fat cross.

It is not clear to me why a number of logical and reasonable amendments aimed at democratizing the process of elections of lawying authorities begins to work exclusively with the third term of the election of the President of the chambers. Why not right away, why should the lawyer be in a semi -authoritarian state for eight years?

A tragic mistake will be the adoption of an amendment, according to which the deprivation of a lawyer of the status will entail further impossibility to be a representative in court even outside the lawyer status. Moreover, according to the text of the bill, without any time restriction.

It is extremely clear that such a punishment is, in fact, a ban on the profession. This for a lawyer is worse than imprisonment.

It still seemed to me justified that the ban on engaging in a certain activity as a type of punishment for a committed misconduct is so fateful that it was assigned by the legislator to the exclusive competence of the court. And so we get a situation when this right is received by a non -profit organization. Quasisud, led by recipients of lawyer contributions and professional landlords ...

What can a lawyer be deprived of status and, therefore, the right to a profession? As you can see, for criticism of the leadership, for applying to law enforcement agencies, for untimely payment of contributions for its maintenance, for breeding mules ... I'm not saying that such a situation directly contradicts civil, arbitration and administrative procedural legislation.

The law says that a lawyer is an independent professional adviser on legal issues. I am weak to imagine an independent legal adviser, fearing for their own fate. The bill needs public discussion, to put it on the vote “from the wheels”, without such a discussion, is unacceptable. The price of the error is fatally high.