Monitoring the Russian State: Grassroots Oversight of the Russian Legal System

• In Event: Accountability in Hybrid and Authoritarian Regimes

Abstract

What role can citizens in authoritarian regimes play in exercising oversight of the legal system and ensuring accountability? To look more closely at this question, I focus on a particular set of accountability measures that are widespread in Russia—organized monitoring activities. From vote monitoring to monitoring state hospitals and orphanages, to observation of protests, police stations, and courts, this form of citizen activism has proliferated over the past ten years. In this paper, I examine monitoring campaigns focused on the legal system (police, prosecutors, courts), relying on documents produced by these campaigns, along with interviews of organizers and participants to better understand the motivations, methods, and activities of people who participate. Key to these activities is the realization that one of the most effective ways to hold the state accountable is to require that it follow its own laws, a practice that has been handed down from the Soviet dissident movement in the 1970s and 1980s and updated using new technologies. This form of accountability is particularly well suited to the Russian legal system which is steeped in bureaucratic regulations and staffed by bureaucrats whose quantitative indicators are closely monitored from above, also a feature of many other authoritarian regimes.

In the paper, I profile several monitoring campaigns, their organizers, and the ordinary citizens who take part. To give one brief example, the “Court through the Eyes of Citizens” project (Sud glazami grazhdan) has created a simple seven item checklist from the law regulating courts, which requires that a court building have a flag, handicapped ramp, no-smoking placard, etc. In a two-week-long yearly campaign, ordinary citizens, armed with the checklist, take cell phone photos of court buildings near where they live and email or text them to a central repository. Any violations are then written up and sent to local and regional court authorities, who are obligated by law to respond within 30 days. Failure to respond or to make changes will often lead to a second letter, this time to national authorities. Using the knowledge that a bureaucrat’s worst fear is to draw the attention of superiors at the national or regional level, these campaigns are often effective in making small changes. More symbolically, these actions use the state’s own mechanisms to reinforce the idea that government is not above the law. They also empower participants to understand that they are not simply subjects of the regime, but can also, regardless of their politics, be an active part of holding that regime accountable and improving governance. Similar campaigns have been launched to monitor the insides of court buildings, police stations, and police themselves (i.e. badge wearing) for compliance with the law.

I conclude that far from being quiescent, repressed, or co-opted, civil society in Russia is creative and resilient in the face of increasingly harsh laws restricting its activity. One of these strategies, exemplified by monitoring campaigns, is the devolution of activity to the everyday citizen, which is much harder to control through legislation limiting civil society activity. Consequently, this paper also contributes to better understanding the increasing pluralism of civil society in Russia, moving beyond a focus on traditional professionalized human rights organizations to looking at the grassroots forms of organizing that empower ordinary citizens to hold the government accountable in the course of their everyday lives.

Author

• Lauren McCarthy, University of Massachusetts, Amherst