Honesty as a Basic Component of the Judge's Professional Profile

Corruption continues to be a leading threat to the global community. International legal institutions are interested in improving legal mechanisms for overcoming corruption among various categories of officials, including presidents, senior officials, parliamentarians, prosecutors, and judges. The subject of the study was the well-established criteria for selecting candidates for appointment to the post of judge, mainly moral and ethical, which are enshrined in international acts ratified in the Russian Federation. The study focuses on the honesty of judges as a legal phenomenon of international and national legislation. The article analyzes the Bangalore principles of judicial conduct as a set of legal norms and rules of conduct of judges addressed to states; the special status of judges in the implementation of the Convention on Human Rights is taken into account. This aspect was examined and presented in the fourth assessment report on the Russian Federation, adopted at the 77th plenary meeting of the GRECO (Group of States against Corruption). Using the comparative legal method of the study, the authors analyzed international and Russian legislative acts and, based on the results obtained, come to the conclusion that the trends in regulating requirements in terms of the moral and ethical qualities of judges coincide. According to the authors, an interrelated process is the development of a method for reliable assessment of moral and ethical qualities of candidates for the position of judge. The analysis of published sources shows that there are no doctrinal studies on this issue, but also no common practical recommendations from practitioners who are familiar with the real situation in terms of selecting candidates for courts of various instances. The formal legal method of research has shown that at present it is almost impossible to regulate the essential moral categories, but the demand for an exact definition of the concepts "justice", "honesty", "equality of law" of the public legal consciousness has actually reached the maximum pre-crisis point. As long as the law does not clearly define the boundaries of the term, each legal entity will put its own meaning in this term, which usually leads to conflicts, including internal ones. Judges as subjects of legal relations need a standard definition of ethical categories more than others. The inner qualities of the judge as a person should determine the judge as a professional. For the first time, the authors make specific proposals for implementing the recommendations given to the Russian Federation by GRECO in determining the criteria for "honesty" as an integral moral quality of a judge. The proposals can be used in the development of professional standards, as well as in the preparation of ethical codes and rules for regulating judicial conduct.

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