Judiciary of Russia

• 1. Introduction

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  The Judiciary of Russia operates on a paradox. It is a vast, elaborately structured institution, anchored in a written constitution that explicitly guarantees judicial independence. And yet Transparency International found that 78% of respondents reported they did not expect to find justice there. How does a system so formally intricate become one so widely distrusted? The answers lie inside its courts, its prosecutors, its history, and the pressure that flows down from the top.

• 2. Three Tracks, One System

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  Russia runs what its own legal scholars call a trifurcated court system, meaning it divides into three parallel tracks: constitutional courts, ordinary courts, and arbitration courts. Sitting above all of them are two apex institutions: the Constitutional Court and the Supreme Court.

  Ordinary courts handle the broadest caseload. They take every criminal case in Russia, plus civil, administrative, and administrative-offence matters. Within that track a further split runs between military and non-military courts, with garrison military courts and military courts of military districts and fleets handling cases involving military personnel only.

  Arbitration courts, known in Russian as arbitrazh courts, occupy a separate lane. They deal with contractual disputes, ownership questions, loan defaults, bankruptcy proceedings for both companies and individuals. The system of arbitration courts is supervised by a 30-judge Judicial Chamber for Commercial Disputes that became part of an expanded Supreme Court as of the 8th of August 2014, following the merger of the old Supreme Court and the former High Court of Arbitration.

  At a specialized corner of that arbitration track sits the Court of Intellectual Rights, which became operational on the 3rd of July 2013. It handles cassation review of cases involving copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets. Unlike most courts, it offers no standard appellate procedure for the cases it hears at first instance; those go directly to its own presidency for the first cassation review, and then to the Supreme Court's Chamber for Commercial Disputes.

• 3. Apex Courts

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  The Constitutional Court of Russia, known in Russian as Конституционный суд Российской Федерации, is composed of 11 judges and requires a quorum of 8 to sit. Its job is not ordinary judicial review but something more specific: it decides whether federal laws, presidential decrees, regional constitutions, and intergovernmental treaties comply with the federal constitution. Disputes between two or more federal bodies, or between a federal body and a regional member of the Federation, also land here. Cases involving constitutionality of laws, presidential impeachment, and the court's own legislative proposals must be resolved in plenary sessions.

  The Supreme Court, with 115 members in total, sits above the ordinary and arbitration tracks. Its Presidium functions as Russia's final court of appeal, composed of thirteen judges: the Chief Justice, one first deputy, six further deputies, and five other Supreme Court judges. Only the Prosecutor General holds the right to appeal to the Presidium. That narrow gate has a measurable effect: in 1998, only 0.4% of criminal cases reviewed by three-judge Supreme Court panels ever reached the Presidium and ended in an acquittal.

  The Supreme Court's internal chambers cover civil, criminal, administrative, commercial disputes, military, and appellate matters. The last of those, the appeals chamber, can review decisions made by the other chambers only when those chambers acted as courts of first instance. An attached Academic Consultative Council, drawn from the court's own members, academics, practicing lawyers, and law enforcement officers, assists in legal and academic questions, with members elected at plenary sessions.

• 4. District Courts and Magistrates

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  District courts, called районный суд or городской суд in Russian and formerly known as People's Courts until 1996, form the ground-level foundation of Russian criminal justice. They sit in areas, urban districts within cities, and towns, and take criminal cases where imprisonment runs for more than three years. A single judge, sometimes joined by a jury, hears those cases.

  Magistrates, or мировой судья, handle the lighter end of the docket: criminal matters carrying imprisonment of less than three years, including petty hooliganism, public drunkenness, and serious but non-criminal traffic violations. They also take minor civil matters such as simple divorces, some property disputes, land disagreements, and certain labour cases. At the time the magistrate system was being established, they were expected to hear two-thirds of all civil cases and close to 100,000 criminal cases.

  Magistrates were first created in 1864 as part of the Judicial Reform of Alexander II. They were abolished in 1917 after the October Revolution and only gradually reintroduced between 2001 and 2003. They are usually appointed by the regional legislature, though they may also be elected, and they share most of the qualification requirements that apply to other judicial appointments.

• 5. The Prosecutor's Grip

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  The Prosecutor General of Russia holds a position unlike any other in the system. Though Russia's Constitution declares the judicial branch independent of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches, the source is plain on one point: the Prosecutor General remains the most powerful component of the Russian judicial system.

  The Prosecutor General is nominated by the President and confirmed by a majority of the Federation Council for a term of five years. If the President's nomination fails, a new candidate must be proposed within 30 days. Early resignation requires approval from both the Federation Council majority and the President. The office oversees prosecution in court on behalf of the state, supervises law enforcement bodies conducting investigations, and monitors the execution of judicial decisions in criminal cases.

  Below the Prosecutor General, the structure fans out in a precise hierarchy. Prosecutor's offices of the federal subjects are subordinate to the General Prosecutor's Office. Offices of towns and raions report to those of the federal subjects. Specialized offices covering environmental, penitentiary, transport, and closed-town matters all report upward to the General Prosecutor's Office. Military prosecutors, while wearing military uniform and holding commissioned officer ranks, are explicitly not subordinate to any military authority other than higher military prosecutors.

  In 1993, when jury trials were reintroduced to Russia after a gap dating back to 1917, the Prosecutor General actively opposed their return.

• 6. Becoming an Advocate

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  In Russia, holding a legal education is enough to practice law in most settings. But appearing before a criminal court, or before the Constitutional Court, requires membership in the Advokatura. That credential is not simply a license; it is a formal status with its own oath, registers, chambers, and disciplinary code.

  To sit for the Advokatura qualification exam, a candidate must hold a higher legal education and either two years of post-graduation experience in legal work or a training period inside a law firm. The exam has two stages: a written computer test covering professional conduct and advocate responsibility, and an oral exam where the candidate must demonstrate knowledge across multiple bodies of law and work through simulated real-life legal problems. A failed candidate must wait one year before trying again.

  The qualifications commission that runs the exam is composed of seven advocates, two judges, two representatives of the regional legislature, and two representatives of the Ministry of Justice. After passing, the candidate takes an oath, and from that moment becomes a member of the advocates' chamber of the relevant federal subject. The certificate issued is the only official document confirming advocate status.

  Advocates may carry out their professional activity anywhere in Russia, regardless of which regional chamber they belong to. They can work individually through an advocate's office, which requires at least three years of prior practice inside a collegium or bureau, or as members of a collegium or bureau. Certain combinations are forbidden: an advocate cannot simultaneously be a government official, a notary, a judge, or an elected official, and cannot work under an employment contract except in scientific or teaching roles.

  As of 2018, Russia had 49.4 advocates per people in the country. In 2002, there were 47,000 defense lawyers total for a population of more than 145 million, while the courts that year sentenced about 1 million people for criminal offences and considered 3 million administrative offences and 2.5 million civil cases. For comparison, the number of active lawyers before the judiciary of California alone, as of December 2012, exceeded 179,000 for a state population of more than 37 million.

• 7. Jury Trials Under Pressure

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  Trial by jury first entered Russian law with the Judicial Reform of Alexander II in 1864. It was abolished after the October Revolution in 1917, reintroduced in 1993, and extended to an additional 69 regions in 2003. Even so, the number of jury trials remains small: around 600 per year out of approximately 1 million trials.

  Jurors sit separately from the judges and decide questions of fact alone, while the judge determines questions of law. During the first three hours of deliberation, they must reach a unanimous verdict. After that point, a majority verdict is permitted, and six jurors are sufficient to acquit. Jurors may also ask the judge to show leniency in sentencing.

  Juries are selected by the prosecution and defense together from a list of 30-40 eligible candidates. The results are striking: juries have granted acquittals in 15-20% of cases, compared with less than 1% in cases decided by judges alone.

  Those acquittal numbers carry a warning attached. Acquittals from juries are frequently overturned by higher courts. Skeptical juries have been dismissed on the verge of delivering verdicts. Accusations of juror intimidation and bribery have surfaced. And the scope of offences eligible for jury trials has been progressively narrowed: in 2008, anti-state criminal cases including treason, espionage, terrorism, and forcible seizure of power were removed from jury jurisdiction entirely.

  The Carnegie Moscow Center, cited in analyses of the Russian judiciary, states that judges deliver not-guilty verdicts only once every seven years, and that even those rare verdicts are typically repealed.

• 8. Legitimacy and Its Limits

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  Two Constitutional Court judges spoke out in 2009, and what they said was striking precisely because of where they said it. Vladimir Yaroslavtsev, who also served on the Council of Judges, told the Spanish newspaper El Pais that the presidential executive office and security services had undermined judicial independence. Anatoly Kononov, who had frequently dissented from majority rulings on the Constitutional Court, echoed him in an interview with Sobesednik, stating plainly that there was no independent judiciary in Russia.

  The response was swift. In October of that year the Constitutional Court, in what was described as an unprecedented motion, accused Yaroslavtsev of undermining the authority of the judiciary in violation of the judicial code. Yaroslavtsev resigned from the Council of Judges but kept his seat as a judge. Kononov resigned from the Constitutional Court on the 1st of January 2010, seven years ahead of schedule.

  The structural conditions they described are traceable. Court presidents hold sole discretion over which judge receives which case, with no systematic procedure requiring objective allocation. Reports have emerged of presidents consistently assigning sensitive cases to particular judges, or transferring cases to a new judge mid-trial.

  At the arbitration level, a more encouraging picture has formed: arbitrazh courts have been identified as particularly effective in handling business disputes. The number of people seeking help from the judicial system rose from 1 million under Yeltsin to 6 million under Putin. But the acquittal rate from judge-only trials sits below 1%, Carnegie Moscow Center tracks not-guilty outcomes appearing roughly once in seven years, and Transparency International's survey found that 78% of respondents expected no justice when they walked in the door. The VIII All-Russian Congress of Judges convened from the 17th to the 19th of December 2012, one of the formal bodies tasked with addressing those gaps.