Russian Lawyer Fights for Reforms in Legal System

“The lawyer has never been a popular character in Russian literature,” says Sergei A. Pashin, a hard-working, soft-spoken legal scholar whose mission is to bring his profession--and the law itself--at least some respect.

Pashin, 31, leads the reform unit of President Boris N. Yeltsin’s State Legal Agency. For two years, he has been campaigning for the “bourgeois” concepts--such as presumption of innocence--that Soviet professors taught him to reject.

Thanks to laws that Pashin helped draft, judges earn top government salaries and nominate all candidates for the bench, insulating it from political pressure. They may overrule police arrests as unwarranted, and do so in one-seventh of appeals.

That’s still a long way from the law-governed state that the reformers envision. Trained in the Soviet era, judges are less willing to challenge prosecutors, and they convict 99% of the people they try. Prisons remain a fiefdom of the police--not under judicial control, where reformers want them.

Seeking to bypass judges, build confidence in the courts and educate the citizenry in Western-style justice, Pashin worked to restore jury trials in Russia last winter, more than 75 years after the Communists abolished them.

Juries try criminal cases in nine of Russia’s 89 regions and republics. Somewhat more skeptical than judges, they oblige some prosecutors to prepare better evidence or throw out forced confessions. Juries acquit about 10% of defendants and convict 30% on reduced charges.

“It’s a revelation to some judges that you cannot put somebody on trial without sufficient evidence,” Pashin said.

Seven other regions want juries, but many judges and politicians oppose them, fearing the system will encourage criminals. Although enshrined in the new constitution, jury trials, Pashin believes, will take at least a decade to institute throughout Russia.