Second Component "Improving Court Attitudes towards the Poor and Socially Vulnerable Groups"

The component is implemented under supervision of L.O. Ivanov (PhD)and E.K. Glushko (PhD)

Poor and vulnerable are very sensitive to the courts attitudes towards them due to the financial status and caused by it a specific mindset. Therefore, ensuring effective excess to justice and fair trial is conditioned to how the courts treat the poor.

Since the courts tend to pay less attention to the procedural formalities and substance of the case in the suits with the participation of the poor, the professionalism of the court hearing thus diminishes. Therefore, within this Component the monitoring of the court proceedings with the participation of the poor will be conducted. After monitoring is done its results will be used for data analysis and drawing conclusions, which will be subsequently delivered to the judicial system representatives. Monitoring is done in two participating regions – Leningrad region and Perm region.

During the monitoring the following activities are planned:

• Monitoring of the court hearings, where at least one party belongs to the poor or vulnerable. To ensure a validity of the monitoring interviews with the participants and focus groups with the judges and judge assistants will be organized;
• Elaboration of the Instructions on how the monitoring, interviewing and focus group tools should be used (available only in Russian);
• Series of trainings for the monitoring agents in the participating regions;
• Series of seminars and conferences to establish dialog between the representatives of the judicial system. Organization of these conferences is extremely important in giving the judges and their assistants an understanding of the obstacles created by them to fair trial;
• Evaluation of the Project effectiveness by conducting exit polls with the participants of the hearings on their satisfaction with the way the case was adjudicated.

Brochures that are planned to be published within this component:

• Analytical report "Standards of Fair Trial and Consideration of the Cases with Participation of the Poor and Socially Vulnerable" (pdf, 251KB);
• Sociological tools of monitoring and Instruction on how to use those tools;
• Methodological recommendations to ensure fair trial for the poor and socially vulnerable;
• Methodology for monitoring the effectiveness of the legal aid centers.

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