Recusal and Self-Recusal of Judges as Guarantees of Their Independence

The principle of judges' independence, now known in different forms of court procedure in the Russian Federation, is one of the latest to be introduced into the corresponding criminal procedure system. The task of the state, and of the lawmakers who include one or another principle in special legislation, is not only to introduce this principle formally, "de jure", but also to implement it and guarantee it "de facto". The question of whether the principle of judges' independence is observed in criminal procedure and what the state should do to enforce it can only be answered through the analysis of the procedural guarantees of this principle. To achieve this aim, the author has analyzed court practice and data of court statistics. Specifically, the author studied 100 acts of the courts of first instance that granted requests, petitions of recusal of a judge and acts of appeal and cassation courts that overrode the decisions of the courts of first instance on the grounds of unlawful composition of the court or violations of the recusal procedure. The study is based on the dialectic method of understanding the objective reality. The author used general and specific research methods during work on this article: systemic, statistical, axiomatic, the method of expert evaluations, questionnaires, etc. In the process of research, the author analyzed such conceptual problems of recusal and self-recusal in court procedures as the practical implementation of lawful grounds for recusal of a judge and their interpretation, as well as the correlation between the institution of recusal (and self-recusal) and the conflict of interests, as well as the methods of overcoming it. Having summarized the obtained results, the author came to the conclusion that it is necessary to improve the institution of recusal and self-recusal of judges by amending the Criminal Procedure Code of the Russian Federation by the norm that gives the sides the right to disagree with the self-recusal of a judge, which should be included in the trial transcript and will ensure the legitimacy of the judicial composition. Moreover, the author believes that the existing law enforcement practice testifies to the unreasonably wide interpretation of such a ground for recusal as the proof that the judge is personally, directly or indirectly, interested in the outcome of the case. This situation proves that there is a presumption of distrust towards those who hold judicial power and that it should be reconsidered at the level of state policy in the part of defining key trends of the development of the Russian Federation's court system.

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