Judicial Transparency: Towards Sustainable Development in Post-Soviet Civil Society

Abstract

The processes of transition to democracy that post-Soviet countries underwent in the early 1990s predetermined different directions for their further development. The author presents and proves the hypothesis that in the context of post-Soviet civil society, judicial transparency arose as a response to a social demand at a certain historical moment of crisis of public authority. The idea of transparency in post-Soviet countries appeared only at a certain level of development of political institutions and public law, pointing out the democratic transition of power. At the same time, its emergence established information asymmetry and the poor quality of state institutions of power. The need to ensure the transparency of judicial activity, in addition to the natural process of the democratic transition of power, is also driven in post-Soviet countries by two important factors. The first is that in the modern world, the judiciary is increasingly becoming involved in the process of law-making, which requires the transformation of existing ideas about the system of checks and balances. The second is related to a global tendency in the fight against corruption, which has been a key problem for the countries of this region for many years. Although it has become the de facto rule for developed democracies, transparency affects the development of the legal culture of populations in transitional democracies differently. It performs various functions, including educational, preventive, stimulating, communicative, protective, and others. The article pays special attention to the unique forms of communication between courts and the public that have arisen in post-Soviet countries with an unstable political situation. In studying them, the author highlights the transformation of transparency from a factor of the development of civil society into one of its results.