Russian Criminal (In)Justice: Pending Liberation from the Soviet Past

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Brief Description

The Russian system of criminal justice was never flawless – neither in the Russian Empire nor in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. Under the Soviet rule the system of criminal justice was based on fully undemocratic principles including the absence of presumption of innocence, open violation of Habeas corpus, accusatorial bias, limited role of defense attorneys, and lack of decisional independence of Soviet judges. One task of the Soviet system of criminal justice was to prosecute dissent and to protect the Soviet state from its own citizens.
After the breakup of the Soviet Union, changes in the system of criminal justice were one of the most important tasks on the agenda: humanization, democratization, and the maximum possible elimination of the Soviet legacy became top priorities. In the mid-1990s, several changes in the criminal procedural legislation were made due to the efforts of the Russian Constitutional Court. However, the post-Soviet reforms did not address the roots of the problem.
In the early 2000s, the priorities changed again, de-Sovietization disappeared from the agenda, and this new trend strongly affected the system. Escalation of repression in the 2010s and 2020s, especially vis a vis dissent, demonstrated that the fundamental task of liberation from the Soviet past has not been completed.
At this roundtable, we will discuss how the Soviet legacy affected Russian system of criminal justice. We will offer an interdisciplinary approach to discussing the problems of the Russian system of criminal justice from the viewpoint of legal scholars and practitioners, political scientists, and journalists.

Sub Unit

• Politics/Law

Chair

• Pavel Ivlev, KRES Poliskola

Roundtable Members

• Jeffrey David Kahn, Southern Methodist U

• Maxim Krupskiy, U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Lauren Alicia McCarthy, U of Massachusetts Amherst

• Ekaterina Mishina, Free U (Latvia)

• Peter H. Solomon, U of Toronto (Canada)