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Email this citationCIAO DATE: 10/05
The Complexity of Success: The U.S. Role in Russian Rule of Law Reform
Matthew J. Spence
July 2005
Abstract
MIXED RESULTS FROM THE PROLIFERATION OF WESTERN RULE OF LAW assistance over the past twenty years has taught us much about what efforts do not work. Criminal justice reform in Russia offers a different type of lesson; it is a rare success story of rule of law promotion. In the 1990s, the U.S. government sought to promote the rule of law in many parts of the former Soviet Union and beyond, but few of these efforts outside Russia produced concrete results. Instead, lawlessness became a primary symptom of the apparent failure of many attempted rule of law reforms in the former Soviet Union.
Against this backdrop of disappointment, in 2001 Russia adopted a liberal new Criminal Procedure Code and introduced jury trials after nearly a decade of U.S. rule of law assistance that supported precisely these reforms. U.S. policy makers considered these reforms a major success. Because problems with criminal procedure—arbitrary arrests, overzealous prosecutors, sham trials, and other due process violations—lay at the heart of some of Russia's worst human rights violations, the new code represented an important advance. On paper and increasingly in practice, the code protects the accused from procedural abuses and defines and institutionalizes many of the civil rights expected of a liberal democracy.
