Access to judicial decissions: problems and solutions

Abstract

The article discusses the problems associated with providing public access to court decisions. The research has been carried out on the materials of the Russian Federation. The sources are the RF Constitution, codes of various legal areas such as criminal code, codes of criminal procedure, of civil procedure, of arbitration procedure, federal legislative acts on mass media and personal data, commentaries to the legislation, normative acts of the Supreme, Constitutional and Supreme Arbitration Courts of the RF and analytical publications of some Russian legal academics. The author develops his approach to the problem on the basis of the principle of judicial procedure transparency. The publication describes and assesses restricted and wider interpretations of the principle. The author supports the second type of the interpretations. The article analyzes the having existed until 2010 and existing at the moment ways to access the court acts. It has been found that the access to the judicial acts issued after 2010 has become easier. Among the soft spots of the current access, the following points have been mentioned, in particular: a larger number of limitations and prohibitions as to the access because of wider interpretations of the concept of secret by courts and legislators, state security, privacy and family life. The concept cases involving state security is too abstract, which provides judges with a very wide interpretation. The access is forbidden to the cases involving rights and legal interests of adults. The fees for using commercial data bases are high, which is another bar to the information. The judicial materials are published at the discretion of judges and secretariat. In the opinion of the author, additional changes are required to the legislation.