What Are Courts Silent About: Monitoring Russian Courts' Official Websites - First Results

On Thursday, August 12, 2010, at 12 AM, the IIFD holds a press conference (supported by the Regional Press Institute) presenting results of first Monitoring of Russian federal courts’ official websites.

Conference Address:
Office 314 (Regional Press Institute), “Ligovka” Business Center, 73, Ligovsky pr., St.-Petersburg

On July 1, 2010, the Russian law on access to judicial information, approved in late December 2008, came into force. The courts had a year and a half to be prepared to its observance. One of key provisions in the new law is free access to judicial information through courts’ official websites.

So, the IIFD experts for the very first time performed large-scale monitoring of all Russian federal courts’ websites in order to reveal whether the courts were ready to observe the new law since July 13. They monitored official websites of the Supreme Court of Russia, the Supreme Courts of Russian republics, the courts of the Russian Federation subjects, and the district (first-instance) courts. The results are not too optimistic: closeness trends (characteristic for a number of official bodies) show themselves also for court instances.

Evgeny Smirnov, IIFD lawyer, and Vladimir Golubev, IIFD expert and research supervisor, will speak on the research results at the press conference.

On July 19, President Medvedev declared that “today, a court should be open for public control and more accessible for citizens”. However, up to now, one can hardly speak of any real public control of courts.