On the Procedural Plaintiff's Right to Court Costs 258 Reimbursement

The article examines problems of exercising rights for compensation of the costs paid for the services of a representative in court by noncommercial organisations filing a claim to defend rights, freedoms and legitimate interests of other individuals or of a group of individuals. The research solves the following problems: 1) the regulation of the legal status of procedural plaintiffs in civil proceedings, in terms of their right to reimbursement of court costs existing in positive law, has been analysed; 2) a radical change in judicial practice concerning claims for reimbursement of expenses for the services of a representative incurred by public organisations filing claims to defend a group of individuals or to defend interests of specific individuals, that took place in the second decade of the 21st century has been revealed. The methodological basis of the research is the dialectical cognition method. The author also used systems analysis, a comparative study, formal logical and historical legal analysis, a formal legal method, a method of legal comparison, and the method of legal positivism in its statism version. Empirically, the research is based on the norms of civil procedural legislation; acts of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation and the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation; appellate rulings of the supreme courts of republican, territorial, regional, and other courts of this level on specific cases; and works of national legal scholars on the issues explored. The author makes the following conclusions. As a result of judicial lawmaking in the Russian civil procedure, the second decade of the 21st century has witnessed an introduction of a norm that deprives noncommercial organisations, having initiated proceedings to defend the interests of a group of individuals, of the right to reimbursement of such legal costs as the cost for the services of representatives. The reasoning that led the Russian Supreme Court to the creation and to the formal introduction of this norm in the Plenum Resolution of the Russian Supreme Court is rife with logical flaws. The rule created by the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation violates the principle of equality of all for the law and the court. Judicial rule-making is actually existent, but the procedural norms created by higher courts do not always contribute to the efficiency of legal proceedings; consequently, it is essential to recognise explicitly the existence of judicial rule-making and to regulate its order and its forms at the legal level. It is necessary to return the right to reimbursement of expenses for representatives' services to noncommercial organisations filing claims to defend interests of a group of individuals or specific individuals.

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