Bearing in mind an ultimate goal of monitoring as a means of enhancing and refining the Russian legal system, it appears that the Convention and the ECtHR’s judgements become mere background noise, irrelevant to the system.has been narrowed and the human rights “noise” is not going to produce, sociologically speaking, further impact on that system. Notably, the last report issued by the Russian Ministry of Justice on results of monitoring issued on November 2, 2022 underlines the annulment of legislative norms that “implied the improvement of the Russian Federation legislation as a result of the European Court rulings.”
The issue at stake is that internal restructuring and perturbations spurred by the EctHR’s judgements had previously restrained the crime control programme by reinforcing due-process rights, and had buy phone number list facilitated deeper socialization concerned with not just institution-building, but changes in patterns of Russian law enforcement officers’ actual behavior. Addressing this effect, almost all defence lawyers interviewed stressed the utmost significance of the ECtHR’s pilot-judgement procedure for pinpointing systemic problems within the RCJS. One of respondents said:
I believe that this was of paramount importance, since it was a kind of guideline for the legislator, which, of course, didn’t have to be used as a ‘carbon copy,’ but could be taken into account. And on this basis, to improve the legislation. And we know a lot of such examples concerning the Russian legislation and pilot-judgements. It works. It worked. And you know this is an ‘external audit.’ It’s always good to be externally audited.
One can speculate that resolving many structural problems identified in Russia by the ECtHR (ensuring a right to an adversarial trial, and addressing poor justification of pre-trial detentions, cases of torture, etc.) will now face additional challenges. It goes without saying that the ECtHR was an international institution with the capacity to observe the RCJS’s functioning and to legally demand that problems within it be solved. Although there is still an option to resort to the United Nations Committees, all interviewees had little faith in the efficiency of this mechanism for safeguarding human rights in the Russian context.