Prospects of Improving the Mechanism of Judicial Protection in Russian Criminal Proceedings: Issues of Theory and Practic

Abstract

Evaluation of the trends of judicial protections development in accordance with constitutional and international legal standards is carried out through the prism of analyzing draft laws regulating court procedures and the reform of Russian court system. The author argue that it is not acceptable to limit the right to judicial appeal against the actions (inaction) and decisions of the preliminary investigation bodies and the prosecutor by introducing the obligatory preliminary examination of such complaints by the head of the investigation agency or the prosecutor according to the procedure set by Art. 124 of the Criminal Procedure Code of the Russian Federation. They also criticize the draft law according to which only the introduction and the resolution of the verdict are pronounced on all the criminal cases: if made into law, this will greatly limit the transparency of criminal court procedures and the right of the accused and their defense attorney to appeal the verdict. The authors identify the faults in the draft law aimed at simplifying the procedure of examining the appeals (petitions) against interim solutions because the elimination of the court investigation will limit the implementation of the adversarial principle at the stage the court of appeals proceedings. It is shown that the current reform of procedures of a jury trial is aimed at strengthening and improving the judicial protection mechanism. The authors summarize the conclusions of contemporary research that although some parameters of the jurys efficiency could vary depending of the number of the jurors, in general, a smaller or a greater number of jurors does not have a decisive impact on the quality of the verdict. They show the positive prospects of giving the Head of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation the right to initiate the supervisory proceedings for criminal cases and of including in the Criminal Procedure Code of the Russian Federation the right of the RF Commissioner for Human Rights to submit cassation and supervision petitions. The analysis of draft laws allows the authors to evaluate the trends for improving the mechanism of court protection in the criminal court procedures of the Russian Federation in each of the two «dimensions» of judicial protection - the institutional and the functional one.