Kremlin

President of Russia

| A WORD TO VISITORS |
| SEND A LETTER |
| PHOTO ALBUM |
| DISCOVERING THE KREMLIN |
| SUBSCRIPTION |
| RUSSIAN |

National Priorities:
| Tax Reform
| Resolving the Housing Problem
| Judicial Reform

JUDICIAL REFORM |

Diary |  |

December 29 2003

Mechanically passing new laws without coordinating them with already existing laws and violating the priorities of legal regulation will inevitably lead to the devaluation of law, and a drop in the effectiveness of its norms, President Vladimir Putin announced at the first meeting of the State Duma of the fourth convocation.

Harsher demands are required in the practice of passing laws, beginning with the earliest stage of preparing draft laws.

Legislation should contain more norms of direct action. There needs to be serious economic and anti-corruption examination of draft laws, constant exchange of ideas with executive power, the expert community, entrepreneurial circles and with civil society as a whole.

December 26 2003

Thanks to new normative legal documents designed to humanise criminal and correctional legislation, 100,000 – 150,000 people who have committed minor crimes will be able to avoid imprisonment. President Vladimir Putin was told this by Justice Minister Yu. Chaika.

Humanising criminal legislation is primarily directed to improving the situation in prisons for pregnant women, old people, invalids and children.

As of December 2003, there were 850,000 people in prison. Applying the new legislative documents will reduce this figure to 700,000 people by the end of 2004.

Amendments have been made by the criminal code that make it possible to open criminal and administrative cases if court decisions are not implemented, and if there are cases of pressure on legal officers. In 2003, the legal officers service sent 600 criminal cases to court, which is three times more than before the according amendments were made.

| Previous events

"We have made great strides towards creating a genuinely independent court system. We have adopted the new Criminal Procedural, Civil Procedural and Arbitration Procedural Codes, thereby assuring additional guarantees for human rights."
Annual Presidential Adress to the Federal Assembly,
May 16, 2003

| Entire diary

|  | TITLE | SITE MAP | ABOUT THE SITE | RUS | | |