Usually, when a title is in the form of a question, one must hunt through the entire article to find the answer. I will not exhaust my reader’s patience and will state up front: yes, it is. But only on one condition—if one views the concept as involving not a list of institutions and organizational and procedural principles but as a complete philosophy of justice guaranteeing and defending the dignity of the individual.

An imperfect legislative system is not evidence of a society’s loss of the fundamental principles of freedom and democracy. Even if we add to this a ponderous, ineffective, and corrupt executive branch, one cannot assert that freedom and democracy are dead. It is only an imperfect (that is, dependent, inaccessible, second-rate, sluggish) court system that is able to signal the extinction of freedom and democracy.

Human beings in principle can make peace with their own relative poverty (this, obviously, is not an attempt to justify poverty), or with their own lowly social status. But humans will never resign themselves to injustice. Injustice results not from material and other kinds of inequality, but, primarily, from the law not being fairly applied to all people, that is, from applying the same legal norms and principles differently to different people depending on their power or social status. It is the courts that are the chief guarantors of equal justice under the law, and it is the courts alone that can defend and reinstate peoples’ violated rights and enforce compensation for injured parties. Most importantly, courts are in a position to educate the legislative and executive branches of government and to compel legislators and bureaucrats to respect the rights and legitimate interests of individuals.

Therefore, neither freedom nor democracy are antithetical to justice. Rather, it is more likely that justice can only be guaranteed when an individual is able to exercise free will while, simultaneously, the free wills of everyone else come up against the shared restraint of law. As I. A. Ilin has written, “The merit at the heart of natural law is the equilibrium of a dignified, inwardly independent, and outwardly free life of the entire multitude of individual spirits that constitute humanity. Such a life is possible only in the form of a peaceful and organized equilibrium between subjective claimants, an equilibrium equally guaranteeing everyone the possibility of a life of spiritual dignity, an equilibrium that therefore violates this equality only in the direction of fairness.” (I. A. Ilin, O suschnosti pravosozmaniia [On the essence of legal conscience] [Moscow, 1993], p. 53.)

Affirmed on October 24, 1991, the “Concept of Judicial Reform” turned out to be the first complete programmatic document of post-Soviet Russia. This was not by intention but by chance: President Boris Yeltsin and the deputies of Russia’s Supreme Soviet did not perceive the justice system as the main instrument for reestablishing and defending freedom. However, there happened to be another group of people who did understand this and who were able to produce a suitable legal document in a short period of time.

Yet even the formal primacy of judicial reform did not see its dwindling capital wasted on the promulgation of a list of priorities for the new government. The failure to understand that judicial reform was the Archimedean lever for Russia’s entire transformation became quickly apparent during the transitional process. The legal environment in which economic transformations were implemented was so toxic that the survivors were those who preferred to act by illegal methods; the rest were overcome by the fumes.

It took approximately ten years for the significance of judicial power and the justice system in general to become clear to the political and economic elite. (Where else but in the courts was it was possible to find together, in a single nexus, the organs of prosecution, law enforcement, and, in part, those of special forces?) The elite began to understand that judicial reform was not at all a minor point for defenders of the law and others holding romantic notions about democracy. They finally grasped that it was not only the average citizen who wound up being vulnerable to the unlawful use of power but also the big politician, the captain of industry, and the financial magnate.

But when members of the elite appealed to the institutions of justice for help, they were horrified by what they found. During the initial period of capital accumulation, they discovered that corruption, the privatization of power, and crass opportunism had succeeded in pervading the judicial sphere. All its various departments had come together to form a closed corporation possessing sufficient power to resist actively changes that, at the least, would introduce a degree of uneasiness into its ranks and, at most, abolish its powerful privileges and, with them, the influence it could exercise at will.

In May 2001, the author and his colleagues, some of whom were the founders of the project Concept of Judicial Reform, published an analytical report in which they attempted to elucidate to what extent the project’s provisions had been realized. It is true, of course, that this study was completed before the ratification of the well-known set of judicial-reform laws sponsored by President Vladimir Putin (which includes laws introducing changes in the status of judges and a new Code of Criminal Procedure). An updated report is currently being planned that will consider these new laws; nonetheless, it would still be worthwhile to consider the state of affairs prior to May 2001.

It turns out that of the 160 positions more or less amenable to concrete evaluation, according to the “Concept,” 95 of them remained either totally unrealized or were not fully executed. Granted, this “accounting method” of legal analysis is not very appropriate, which is why we state with reservation that 41 percent of the “Concept of Judicial Reform” was realized. Even so, this figure is useful as a general indicator.

However, the main point lies elsewhere: the “Concept” is not an assortment of documented technological measures that we need introduce for the machine to start running. The concept underlying both the project and its publication is, first and foremost, to describe a way to achieve a spirit of justice, a spirit made manifest in the parallel organizations and activities of police agencies, courts, and prosecutorial bodies. The merit of this basic concept lies precisely in the fact that it is not merely a list of essential (or desired, possibly modifiable) legislative and organizational innovations, but that it is a set of characteristics distinguishing a democratic system of justice from a repressive, totalitarian one. These characteristics include: total judicial oversight; a guarantee of access to legal redress and legal counsel; the independence of the courts in order to assure their objectivity; guarantees that plaintiffs and defendants will be equal in their ability to present evidence; changes in the legal consciousness of the judiciary; deep changes in how the police operate. Unfortunately, it is impossible to demonstrate impressive successes in even one of these areas.

Naturally, it is far more complicated to make a qualitative analysis of the success of the “Concept” and its basic ideas than it is to show how many of its provisions have or have not been formally implemented. After all, subjectivity is impossible to avoid when making a qualitative evaluation. And yet, today, just such an analysis is essential—although this does not obviate the necessity of the “accounting method.” It is our view that a qualitative analysis is possible, mainly with the help of two instruments: an analysis of judicial, police, and prosecutorial statistics (which must be completely open and accessible to everyone); and sociological studies conducted both among the general population and among judges, lawyers, and employees of the prosecutorial organs and law-enforcement agencies.

Today, the problem is no longer so much one of the importance of judicial reform per se (as we mentioned above, the elite have already understood its necessity), as much as it is one of choosing priorities within the process of reform. The chief priority is none other than to guarantee the independence of the courts. As strange as this may sound, despite the importance of all the other areas of judicial reform, the independence of the courts remains in first place, for it is the linchpin. Once an independent judiciary is achieved, it will, like a locomotive, pull further transformations in our legal system behind it. Only truly independent judges will be in a position to function effectively as protectors and educators of our government machinery, specifically, the legislative and executive branches. Only judicial power that feels itself powerful can be powerful in reality.

But there may be objections from those who would argue, “Say what you like about those other areas, in terms of judicial independence all is well.” Unfortunately, this is not the case. It is worth recalling the classic formula of judicial independence, ratified even by the Constitution of the Russian Federation: “Judges are independent . . . and are subject only to the law.” It is the second half of this formula, however, that provokes major uncertainties. Even if we put aside our suspicion that a majority of the courts are corrupt, the issue of independence remains timely and worthy of concern. Significant evidence can be found in legislative and executive practice to support the assertion that judges cannot be considered completely independent, either as masters in their own house (for example, court chairpersons and executive bodies in the higher courts are free to intervene), or removed from various powers that- be at different levels of government.

For many long years under Soviet rule, people were accustomed to using one particular means of defending their rights—by complaining to the Party or Soviet (that is, government) organs, and, less frequently, by appealing to the public procurator’s office. It was extremely rare for anyone to resort to legal proceedings. When they did, it was for a very limited set of issues, usually in cases involving labor-law violations. Therefore, the judicial process was never a meaningful way of redressing violations of one’s rights. Strictly speaking, there were no rights, for individual rights under conditions in which one was completely dependent on the government cannot be considered rights.

With the liquidation of the totalitarian regime, it was only natural that the methods used to defend one’s rights peculiar to that regime would fall away. Yet even today, those methods still appear to many to be the sole defining features of the justice system. This is only because even a reformed judicial process has not yet become as familiar and common to people as the old ways. It is no accident that a recent sociological study revealed the following lamentable fact: 72.2 percent of the respondents agreed with the statement “Many people do not want to seek redress in the courts, because the unofficial expenditures are too onerous.” In other words, the majority of Russia’s citizens consider the judicial system to be one of the most corrupt of state institutions. And 78.6 percent agreed with the statement “Many people do not resort to the courts because they do not expect to find justice there.”

There are several reasons why the general opinion of the courts is so low. First of all, for many people the court system appears to be the same old Soviet institution that existed in the past—in other words, they think the courts to be completely under the control of the bosses. Second, from a procedural standpoint, the judicial process is much more complicated than the Soviet-era methods. Any old lady living in a small village knows how to write a letter to the boss, but she has absolutely no idea of how to go about bringing legal charges against a government official. Third, it is highly likely that the very idea of seeking legal redress in the courts would never enter her mind. Even if she is aware of their existence, her life experience has taught her to associate the concept of “court” with another world— the big city and the big shots she sees on television.

This alienation and/or defenselessness and the despair it engenders—the feelings of hopelessness—are Russia’s most dangerous social problem. This is why it is vitally important for the country, for its normal development, not just to implement judicial reforms but to do so in such a way that seeking legal redress in the courts becomes for everyone a simple and comprehensible method for defending their rights and legitimate interests. For this, we need not only to bring the courts closer to citizens but we also must constantly explain to the people when and how they can avail themselves of the judicial process, and the steps they need to take in order to do so. The task of educating our citizens on the means of seeking legal redress will become comparable in scope to the task of judicial reform itself. More than that, education of the state as a whole must be an integral part of it.