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DMITRY MEDVEDEV: Colleagues,
This association’s work has come to play a visible part in public political life, and this is linked in many ways to the specific nature of our profession.
Lawyers play a special part in any society. Their professional skills and knowledge enable them to act as the conduit for the ideas of supremacy of the law and contribute to the formation of the rule of law and a full-fledged civil society.
I would like to look in particular at a number of priorities in lawmaking, application of the law and work to educate people about the law.
Russian legislation has developed actively over these last four years. Leading legal research centres and the legal community in general have taken part in this work.
In particular, the passage of part four of the Civil Code completed the codification of the important area of law that is civil law. The major undertaking of enacting new codes in the areas of water and forestry resources has also been completed.
At the same time, however, work on the national projects shows that our land laws and urban development legislation are still far from ideal, and this is holding back rapid development of land resources for housing construction and is creating a large number of practical problems.
The Government and the State Duma deputies have taken urgent measures to pass amendments to the laws. This work is not yet complete but we have accelerated urban development permit procedures, using both legal and administrative levers, in accordance with the practice in our country.
Our education laws have undergone significant changes. In particular, the laws on education standards have been changed and a system of master’s and bachelor’s degrees introduced that, we hope, will make the degrees we award more competitive.
I would like now to mention some of the problems we have yet to resolve.
It is clear that our environmental laws are not keeping up with the times. They contain practically no provisions encouraging economic actors to protect the environment and preserve and make careful use of natural and energy resources of every kind.
The laws on small businesses are another example. These laws make fine declarations but for the most past have done little to improve the business climate in our country and are not making a real contribution to supporting small business.
Another problem is that there is often insufficient coordination in our legislation. This creates big problems in applying the laws in practice and forces our higher judicial authorities to give clarifications even in cases where they are really not necessary at all.
Furthermore, we need to take a comprehensive approach and ensure coordinated application of all the different areas of legislation in order to resolve the social, economic and political issues before us. This concerns the creation and use of intellectual property, for example. This work is underway but, unfortunately, is not at the level it should be.
This work is one of the factors that determine a society’s economic potential and ability to compete. These issues cannot be resolved using civil law alone, even if the codification process has given us modern and quality legislation. It must be reinforced by administrative law, and in some cases it calls for the use of criminal law too, in particular, in cases where copyright laws have been broken.
Enforcement of the laws is the backbone of the rule of law. We need to provide our civil servants with more thorough and higher quality legal training tailored to fit their particular areas of activity.
Our judicial system would benefit from measures to eliminate the excessive load on the peace justices by redistributing the jurisdiction for cases.
We need to better organise the system of pre-court hearing procedures, especially in administrative cases. We need to make more active use of alternative dispute resolution methods such as arbitration and talks between the parties to the dispute. This could help to lighten the load on the courts.
There are still many complaints about the time it takes for cases to be examined in the courts. We need to be decisive here and make the needed changes to our laws.
Finally, we need to look at modernising a number of fundamental laws and statutes that no longer meet today’s demands.
The Law on Organisation of the Courts in the RSFSR [Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic], for example, was enacted back in 1981 and last had some spot amendments made in 1999. This is one of the country’s most important statutes (and in accordance with the Constitution, issues concerning the organisation of the court system can be decided only by federal constitutional laws) and yet it does not comply with the Constitution if only because it defines the organisation of the court system within the framework of a state that no longer exists today.
A whole number of statutes from the USSR and RSFSR are still in force today, although their number is decreasing. This is a signal that we have not addressed this issue in due measure.
Another very important issue is that of educating people about the law. Public organisations, including our association, need to gradually move away from seeing themselves as exclusively professional, closed communities.
Lawyers’ organisations have a duty to be closer to the real daily needs of our people. I know that this association is developing a network of its own regional organisations and that this is going well. Centres providing free consultation to the public have begun work.
But the problem of providing legal assistance to people on low incomes is still very much an issue today. The most important thing in a country under the rule of law is the level of legal culture among the public, their willingness to obey the law and see that this is in their direct interest. Legal nihilism is a related problem in this respect.
What we need to do then is organise a system of legal education that reaches out to schools, universities and the media, getting them all involved. In this respect, I would like to inform you that our decision to establish a legal television channel is going ahead. I hope that our country’s first legal channel, Law TV, will contribute to legal education and will also be of interest and use for the entire Russian public.
Improving the quality of legal education is not limited to simply improving the quality of professional training. What our country needs is not just competent professionals but also people capable of creative and independent thought, people able to take on the responsibility for our country’s future.
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