The Supreme Court corrected itself – Picture of the Day – Kommersant

The verdict may not be read out in full, but the judges will still have to write it before the operative part is announced. The Supreme Court decided to make such amendments to its own bill five years ago, in which it proposes to exempt judges from the need to fully disclose the text of the verdict. This allows you to keep the secret of the deliberation room as a symbol of justice, but the publicity of the process still suffers, the expert believes.

The draft amendments to the Code of Criminal Procedure, allowing judges to read out only the introductory and operative parts of the verdict, were submitted to the State Duma by the Supreme Court (SC) back in 2017. The explanatory note stated that the bill was aimed at “optimizing certain procedural procedures.” Then the document caused sharp criticism in the legal community and was shelved for a long time. However, a month ago, the deputies suddenly returned to it and last week adopted it in the first reading. And on November 15, the Supreme Court decided to clarify own initiative: the corresponding amendments were approved by the Plenum of the Supreme Court.

The amendment being made, its deputy chairman Vladimir Davydov explained at a meeting of the Plenum of the Supreme Court on Tuesday, should eliminate uncertainty on a very important issue: should the verdict be made in full at the time of the announcement of its introductory and operative parts?

Indeed, in civil, arbitration and administrative proceedings, such an announcement procedure means that the preparation of the reasoning part of the decision may be delayed for several days. But for criminal cases, it is proposed to establish more stringent requirements, said Mr. Davydov: the judicial act must be made in the deliberation room in full and signed by all judges before being announced.

According to the current law, the court is obliged to go to the deliberation room or remove all those present from the meeting room to make a decision. Traditionally, the secrecy of the meetings of judges is regarded as one of the main guarantees of their independence. However, the amendments of the Supreme Court allow such a guarantee to be ignored – critics of the bill drew attention to this five years ago. The fact that the proposals of the Supreme Court actually annul the secrecy of the deliberation room, significantly undermine the independence of the court and emasculate the very essence of justice in criminal cases, was stated, for example, in a letter from the Federal Chamber of Lawyers (FPA) sent to the Chairman of the State Duma Vyacheslav Volodin in May 2017.

The new amendment from the Supreme Court is correct, although the bill itself does not fundamentally improve from this, says Vadim Klyuvgant, a lawyer and former vice-president of the FPA, because the final and most important stage of the process becomes completely opaque. It is not even clear how the participants in the process can get the full text of the verdict, he notes: the bill says that they must file a petition, but does not specify when and in what order.

The initiative of the Supreme Court, the expert believes, not only strikes at the transparency of justice, but also involves the emasculation of the appeal process and the reduction of guarantees of judicial control over the investigation.

Although it was decided to keep the secret of the deliberation room as a kind of symbol of justice, it is impossible to encroach on the symbols, concludes Mr. Klyuvgant.

Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Committee on Legislation Yuri Sinelshchikov (KPRF) says that the Communists did not support the initiative of the Supreme Court: it primarily protects the interests of judges, not participants in the process. “We cannot agree with her, especially if we remember that in recent years the workload in criminal cases has been steadily decreasing,” the deputy explains. But, apparently, against the backdrop of a special operation, now everything can be simplified, he concludes.

Anastasia Kornya