Saturday, 27 February 2010
Thursday, 13 August 2009
New Rules for Rough Play
Printed by Russia Profile
The President of the Russian Federation Dmitry Medvedev has introduced a new bill to the Russian Parliament that would revise the current Law on Defense, and would broaden the conditions for Russia’s military action abroad. The introduction comes as a consequence of last year’s August war with Georgia, and sends a worrying message to the CIS countries, some of which already have a strained relationship with Russia.
The current Law on Defense allows Russia’s armed forces to take military action outside Russian territory only in response to aggression that is directed toward the country and poses a threat to Russia’s territorial integrity. The revised law will allow Russia to use military force “to return or prevent aggression against another state, to protect citizens of the Russian Federation abroad, to fight piracy and to ensure the safety of the shipping industry,” the outline of the bill on the Kremlin Web site states.
The president made it clear that the reform to this law has to do with the military conflict with Georgia. “It is tied to the well-known events of last year,” Medvedev told the Interfax news agency. The announcement has been timed to coincide with the one year anniversary of the war, along with the appointment of the new Head of Military Training of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation Valery Yevnevich.
Some may be forgiven for thinking that these moves are meant as a warning to Russia's neighbors. Anatoly Tsiganok, the head of the Center for Military Prognosis of the Institute of Political and Military Analysis, believes that the new revision to the Law on Defense is a demonstration of Russia's power to the Caucasus and to Ukraine. “This law is only being introduced in order to be able to bring the military to fighting mode if any of the Russian peacekeepers are attacked by Georgia in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, without the say of Parliament,” he said.
As a result the revision is likely to upset the international community, which is already starting to worry about what these revisions could imply. “When the bill was first introduced by Dmitry Medvedev, I immediately got worried telephone calls from colleagues in Armenia, Moldova and Ukraine,” Tsiganok said. Russia used the precedent of protecting its own citizens to justify the fighting in August of last year, and the issue of citizen protection now raises the question of what will constitute such protection. Will it be used as an excuse to attack other countries if some misfortune befalls a Russian national there?
Opinion is generally divided between those who, like Tsiganok, believe that there should be no law giving the president the right to use military action abroad, and those who think that such powers may be justified in certain circumstances. The State Duma Deputy and Deputy Chairman of the Security Committee Gennady Gudkov believes that such a law may be necessarily to give the president a certain power of protection against the threats of foreign military attacks and terrorism. However, the existence of the law does not necessarily imply that it must be put into action. “The question of how we will act on the law is a question of future political situations and the relationship that we have with our neighbors and other countries,” he said.
Another debate surrounding the Law on Defense is that of the president's role. Many are concerned about the increasing power that the president will have to make such serious military decisions without consulting the Parliament. “We are constantly rolling toward total monarchy as the constitution and the law get replaced by the will of the monarch. This has led to various catastrophes and cataclysms several times now, and I am absolutely against this kind of model of government,” Gudkov said.
Tsiganok agreed. “When you talk about a law that would allow Russians to fight abroad, I do not think it acceptable that this right is given solely to the president. I believe that the decision to use force abroad should be made only by the Parliament,” he said.
There are also problems with the Russian constitution, which is vague on the procedures for responding to acts of aggression against the country. It does not seem to be clear who would be authorized to make decisions – the Parliament or the president, who would only inform the Parliament of what he had already decided and possibly even acted upon. This absence of a coherent code of conduct needs to be rectified. “The constitution must be developed thoroughly to take into account the various cases that may arise,” Tsiganok said.
Although it is not yet clear how the law will influence Russia's future actions, the decision to amend the existing law in this way may lead to discontent among other CIS countries. Georgia and Ukraine are particularly worried about Russia’s intentions, and this news will certainly increase their apprehension.
The mounting tension in the Caucasus was further intensified on Wednesday, when the Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, while on a trip to Abkhazia, announced plans to spend around $500 million on military bases and the building of a protective border guard system in the region.
Meanwhile, Russia's problematic relationship with Ukraine this week was further jeopardized by Medvedev in an address to the Ukrainian President Victor Yushchenko. In his video blog, Medvedev criticized the Ukrainian authorities for hindering the development of cultural and economic relationships between the two countries and taking “an openly anti-Russian position in relation to the military attack on South Ossetia by Saakashvili's regime.” Medvedev repeated the accusation that weapons used to kill innocent civilians and Russian peacekeepers were Ukrainian, and said that there would not be a Russian ambassador in Kiev until the relationship between the two countries improved.Sunday, 17 May 2009
Who Is to Judge?
Printed By Russia Profile,
May 13, 2009
Experts See Medvedev’s New Initiative as a Step Toward Tighter Presidential Control of the Judiciary
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has proposed a new law to the Duma, which if ratified would mean that the chairman of the Constitutional Court and his deputies will be appointed by the Federation Council, the upper house of the Russian parliament, which will act on behalf of the president. The council is already responsible for appointing the judges of the Constitutional Court, but under the current practice, it is these appointed judges who vote to select a chairman.
The proposal has caused a heated debate among legal professionals and experts. While as of late, Dmitry Medvedev has taken a series of liberal actions, some critics believe that the proposed change of procedure is a sign of the government’s tightening grip on the judicial process.
The present procedure of voting in a representative for the Constitutional Court is a process that is done behind closed doors by the members of that court, arguably because the judges are qualified to choose a suitable representative. However, Elena Mizulina, a State Duma Deputy from the Just Russia faction, told the Kommersant daily that the new procedure would be “more transparent” because the chairman would be appointed by the Federation Council. But Nikolai Petrov, a scholar in residence at Moscow’s Carnegie Center, is skeptical of such an interpretation. “I think that the idea that this change would make the procedure more transparent is a laughable and distorted conclusion...I do not think that it is transparent, but a departure from the democracy that existed before,” he said.
Yet the idea that the president’s appointment of the chairman of the Constitutional Court through the body of the Council Federation means tighter control of the judiciary is nothing new. This control already seems to exist, according to Larissa Efimova, a legal advisor to the State Duma. “The members of the Constitutional Court are also picked by the president, so he could have indirect influence on the chairman of the court, which is what happened before. But the president also has an effect on the decisions that are made by the chairman,” she said. The argument supporting this view is that the Russian authorities already have a lot of control over the decisions of the judiciary. The Yukos case is a prime example of a case in which the judges were criticized for being politically influenced in their verdicts.
This proposed change to the procedure of appointing the chairman in the Constitutional Court comes after a series of apparently liberal moves by president Medvedev and his representatives in the legal sphere. Anton Ivanov, the chairman of the Supreme Arbitration Court of the Russian Federation and a close ally of Medvedev, recently proposed to introduce an examination for judges, which would test their knowledge and professionalism. These examinations would be monitored by lawyers, and the examinations would be kept as records for the whole duration of the judges’ careers. Another “liberal” move by the same man, Ivanov, was the dismissal of Judge Lyudmila Maykova on charges of corruption.
These motions, along with the president’s anti-corruption rhetoric and the disclosure of government members’ financial details (including those of their immediate family), signaled that the country was moving in a more democratic, or at least more transparent, direction. The proposed new measure would seem to undermine the independence of the judiciary and the authority of the judges at the Constitutional Court, the key tenets of the “rule of law” state Medvedev is supposed to be building.
Petrov thinks that this proposal is not at all surprising. “I do not see any liberal actions from the president. I see liberal sayings, but these are not at all turning into actions,” he said. In his opinion, the political image of the president as more liberal is meaningless, since it is not mirrored by liberal reforms. The proposed change of procedures in question is an example of an anti-liberal action, and in Petrov’s view entirely in keeping with Medvedev’s past record.
Another important “illiberal” proposal from the president is to prolong the term of the presidency to six years, and the ruling term for the State Duma to five years. This new law would entail changing the Russian constitution, and has been criticized as a step meant to help the current authorities retain their power. Whether this would be Putin, Medvedev or someone else is yet to be seen, but if passed, the law would hinder any further shift toward democracy.
The proposed new decree has also been criticized for giving the authorities the power to use the position of chairman to the Constitutional Court as an instrument of the Kremlin. This broaches the question of the president’s professional suitability to choose a representative for the judges. “The judges of the Constitutional Court have a very high level of trust; all of them separately can have their own flaws and merits, but all of them are representatives of the community of judges. To assume that the president has more insight than the professional community of judges is not a conclusion that works,” Petrov said. However, Medvedev has been trained as a professional lawyer, a background that could, some say, give him enough professional qualification to decide who would make the best representative for the judges of the Constitutional Court.
Yet other critics see the proposal as politically motivated. Efimova thinks that it is possible that the president wants to have more control over the judicial process. “Perhaps the president feels that he cannot change the composition of the court, but perhaps he can have some influence by assigning the chairman of the court,” she said. Many of the current judges of the Constitutional Court were appointed prior to Medvedev’s term in office. Perhaps by appointing the chairman, the president could gain some hold on the decisions of the court that would otherwise be left to those who were appointed by his predecessor.
Perhaps the president was motivated by doubts about the objectivity of the decisions made by the members of the court? Petrov believes that this is hardly the case. “If the president was such a genius as to be able to stand above the interests and positions of various groups, then this would be an absolute monarchy and we would not need a parliament, or a government as an independent body. We would have a monarch which would make all the decisions. I think that this system has been an anachronism for a long time, and we are in essence moving toward it,” he said.
