Three Court Reports that Indict the Putin Regime

Paul Goble

            Staunton, April 25 – This week has seen three news stories about the courts and rights that taken together offer a devastating indictment of the Putin regime, an indication of the way in which the “hybrid” or better hyphenated democracy the Kremlin leader has imposed contains within itself both a revelation of its failures and a source of its own destruction.

            First, the office of the Russian Supreme Court reported that only two-tenths of one percent of those charged with crimes in Russia are found not guilty, a lower percentage than even in Stalin’s times and yet another indication that what the Russian judicial system provides is not justice but repression (cdep.ru/index.php?id=79&item=4477 and politsovet.ru/58797-rossiyskie-sudy-vynesli-02-opravdatelnyh-prigovorov.html).

            Second, a commission of the Moscow city duma reported that the number of complaints by Russian citizens about the violation of their rights and freedoms had jumped by 11.8 percent from last year to this, a statistical  confirmation of what everyone can see and feel: the deterioration of freedom in Russia (sobkorr.ru/news/5ADEFA96D1570.html).

           

            And third, the number of complaints by Russians to the European Court for Human Rights had skyrocketed by 40 percent from 2016 to 2017 and continues to rise at an accelerating rate so far this year, another indictment of the Putin system given that Russians can appeal to this court only after they have exhausted their domestic options (fparf.ru/news/all_news/news/49109/ and mbk.media/news/kolichestvo-zhalob-na-rossiyu-vyroslo/).