Wednesday, August 10, 2016

The Russian Supreme Court has struck as unfair and unlawful a court decision litigated on a whim - just like American courts usually do

I wrote on this blog repeatedly about American courts completely disregarding the rule of law, or the record in front of them, as a pattern or a system of "that's how we do business in our neck of woods, and hell hath no fury like will be unleashed upon you if you cross us".

You can read about the kind of "fury" unleashed upon litigants who have the audacity to insist upon the rule of law and impartial adjudication in the American courts - and listen to the yesterday's interview of attorney and human rights advocate Zena Cranshaw-Logal.

You can also read about adjudication-on-the-whim on this blog, as well as in the social media where people, more and more, come out and publicly expose judicial retaliation and adjudication-on-a-whim.

It is actually habitual for American judges to rule on the judge's whim, often without an explanation of grounds for the decision, on the whim of a judge, telling the litigant - move up (appeal, if you can afford it) or move on.

The legal profession recognizes the fact of adjudication-on-a-whim as habitual part of the American judicial system - by sayings that "a good lawyer knows the law, a great lawyer knows the judge", and by the fact that attorneys pay a LOT of money (as part of their ETHICAL training) to learn about whims of different judges - to consider and rely on such whims in litigating cases in front of such judges (I understand, judges use their taxpayer-backed time and are paid for telling attorneys about their whims upon which their cases are decided).

And, I wrote a lot on this blog about retaliation by the American court against those who actually insist on fair and impartial adjudication of their court cases, following the rule of law.

At the background of a system of adjudication-on-a-whim in American courts, it was a breath of fresh air to read about a decision of - gasp! - the Russian Supreme Court reported today by the Russian legal press portal pravo.ru.

The Russian Supreme Court reversed a lower appellate court's decision (the interlinked article is in Russian, but, I understand, it can be translated through Google), because the lower appellate court, "in violation of Article 67 of the Civil Procedure Code of the Russian Federation

  1. did not assess proof in the record as to: 
    1. relevance,
    2. admissibility,
    3. credibility of each separate piece of evidence offered as proof, as well as ,
    4. sufficiency and
    5. interconnection of the totality of evidence offered as proof, and
  2. did not eliminate existing contradictions among the aforementioned evidence in the record, even though the factual evidence in the record is material for the correct adjudication of the dispute"
But - that's exactly what American courts do all along, with no reversals!

After having read countless decisions of American courts that leaves an attorney stunned to the core by their lawlessness, and their arrogance in that lawlessness, where the record is disregarded or contradicted, the applicable law is disregarded or contradicted, or no grounds or explanations are given at all for the decisions that clearly contradict the record and the applicable law - my reaction to the reasons for this reversal by the Russian Supreme Court was - really?  Do courts still do that?  Do courts still reverse their brothers for not following the law and/or the record?

And, please, consider the fact that Russia is, basically, a dictatorship with an abysmal record of human rights violations.

And, please, also consider the fact that, even being a dictatorship with an abysmal record of human rights violations, Russia allows its citizens to sue the Russian government in an international court, the European Court of Human Rights, for violations of human rights, seeking monetary compensation from their governments - the relief blocked in the U.S. by:

1) federal courts dismissing such cases on the pretext of judicially created "abstentions", "immunities", deferences and Rooker-Feldman "the biased state court already decided your case, so what do you want from us" doctrines; and

2) by the refusal of the U.S. legislators to fully ratify the International Convention of Civil and Political Rights and to allow Americans to do what Russians (and citizens or non-citizen individuals wronged by other countries, including some dictatorships, subject to the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights and to the United Nations Human Rights Commission) already have - the right to sue those governments in an international forum for human rights violations.

So, it appears that we are not a dictatorship, after all, here in the United States.

We are much, much worse.

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