Status of defence attorneys under threat

Anastasia Kornya, Vedomosti, 8.05.2008

Shortly before leaving office, President Putin proposed amendments to the law about defence attorneys. If approved by the Duma they will make it easier for the Federal Registration Service to disbar a defence lawyer.

Putin suggests that the Registration Service be given the right to go to court with an application for a lawyer to be disbarred if the Council of the Bar Association has not examined its petition or refused to grant such an application. To clarify the circumstances that form the grounds for disbarring a lawyer, says Itar-TASS quoting the presidential press service, the Registration Service would now be able to formally request the necessary materials linked to the work of that attorney.

“In order to ensure a more rapid response” to an application from a territorial branch of the Registration Service that a particular lawyer be disbarred, it is proposed that the period within which the Bar Association must examine the application be reduced from three months to only one. The presidential press service, says Itar-TASS, explains the proposed amendments as part of a redistribution of responsibilities for the oversight and monitoring of the activities of defence attorneys. Following the 2004 administrative reforms part of these functions were transferred from the Ministry of Justice to the Federal Registration Service.

The chairman of the Moscow Bar Association Genry Reznik agrees that the Registration Service has indeed taken over part of the former responsibilities of the Ministry. However, the Ministry had the right neither to become acquainted with a defence attorney’s confidential documents nor to re-examine in court the refusal of the Bar Association to disbar someone in response to an application from an official. These are new rights. Reducing the period for consideration from three months to one, explains Reznik, is a return to pre-2004 practice that had already proved unrealistic. It was almost impossible to gather the members of such a collegiate body within a month.

This last initiative by Putin is a reworking of a bill presented to the Duma by a group of deputies in 2006, recalls Reznik. Then it met fierce opposition and was not adopted. The amendments, in his view, are “an assault on the independence of defence attorneys”. Up to the present the Registration Service has mainly petitioned for Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s attorneys to be disbarred, and has met with refusal. Reznik could only recall two instances, one of which was approved, when the Service’s applications to the Bar Association were not linked to the Yukos affair.

The profession of defence attorney is an institution of civil society that does not require intensified supervision by the State, agrees Pavel Astakhov, himself an attorney and member of the Public Chamber. Astakhov promises to make sure that the Chamber offers a negative assessment of the proposed amendments. The chairman of the Duma committee for constitutional law and nation building Vladimir Pligin was not prepared to comment on the bill. “I’ve not yet read it,” he said. No commentary was forthcoming from the Federal Registration Service.