What kind of developments are happening in human rights legislation, public law and punitive choises? What kind of legal transformations can be perceived in the past 30 years?
Development of Russian Law (DRL) is a collaborative project run by Dr. Marianna Muravyeva to explore Russian law, legal system, legal tradition and legal culture from an interdisciplinary prospective. It brings together socio-legal and doctrinal research to provide deeper understanding of how Russian legal system works.
The disintegration of the USSR opened a new chapter in the penal histories of the former Soviet republics, which had all been constituent parts of the penal monolith built by Stalin and perpetuated by his successors. Since 1991 the successor states have had the opportunity to reform their penal systems; in some cases this has been done within the framework of membership of the Council of Europe whilst others have pursued their own paths hanging on to a greater or lesser degree to legacies from the past. In this episode of Post-Soviet Legal Choices four experts with knowledge of developments in Moldova, Ukraine, Estonia and Kazakhstan, will discuss the legal responses to the crises that afflicted prison systems in the 1990s and to the opportunities since then, to modernize their systems of penality in the peripheries of the former Soviet Union. This discussion will take place against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine which countless examples of the violation of international norms for the treatment of prisoner in Russia has seen how fragile have been the changes introduced into that country’ system of penality, notwithstanding more than two decades of membership of the Council of Europe. The question we will be asking for the other successor states sufficient to overcome the legacies of the punitive penal culture inherited from the USSR.