|
Judge Olikhver's career
Until 2001, Natalya Olikhver was an ordinary judge at the Zheleznodorozhnyy District Court in Ulyanovsk Region. She was regarded as a woman of great integrity, who did not take bribes and was very strict in procedural matters. She had a reputation for harsh, sometimes excessive, sentencing, and also for total loyalty to her superiors. Our sources also say that her work took the place of family life and outside interests.
One way or another, she was emphatically not a rich woman. However, after she received a surprise promotion to the regional court, she was awarded a three-room official flat, which she subsequently bought out. Many identified breaches of the rules here: when Olikhver moved to Moscow she was awarded another official flat but there was no mention of handing back the one in Ulyanovsk.
It's worth noting that very rarely is a district court judge promoted directly to a regional court. Many suspected that this career breakthrough was due to the personal intervention of the then chairman of the Ulyanovsk regional court, Anatoliy Zherebtsov. Shortly before Olikhver's appointment he had also won a promotion, to the chair of the judges' qualifications collegium - one of the highest bodies in the Russian judiciary.
Zherebtsov made his name by arranging the election of the chair of the Moscow City Court, with just a single candidate. This was a judge at the Cheremushkinskiy District Court in Moscow, Olga Yegorova, who duly got the job. And it seems that she invited Olikhver to Moscow on Zherebtsov's recommendation. At a conference in Ulyanovsk Region in February 2002 to review the previous year, the judges named Olikhver as the best performer.
I have been unable to find out how that performance was measured. And we cannot examine Natalya Olikhver's past work because all her previous trials have been personally classified by the current chief judge in the region, Lysyakova. On 30 November 2002, Olikhver was appointed to the Moscow City Court by a Putin decree.
And in summer 2004, she took on the Pichugin case. Here, her principal qualities came to the fore: a severity bordering on rudeness in court, unquestioning loyalty to her superiors, and single-minded pursuit of the result ordered from above. Which in this case, apparently, was to throw the book at Pichugin.
Olikhver's first move as judge for Pichugin's trial was to declare it would be held entirely in camera. I have already examined this episode in detail, but I do want to add one detail. When the defence tried to find out why, she held up one of the volumes of evidence and pointed to the inscription "Top secret". "Is that clear? It's not for me to decide."
If the judge, who wields virtually unlimited power during a trial, had bothered to look at the prosecution's "secret" documents, she would have seen that the classification was unjustified. Any judge is duty bound to examine the grounds for secrecy and ensure a level playing field for the adversarial process.
Начало | << | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46 | 47 | 48 | 49 | 50 | 51 | 52 | 53 | 54 | 55 | 56 | 57 | 58 | 59 | 60 | 61 | 62 | 63 | 64 | 65 | 66 | 67 | 68 | 69 | 70 | 71 | 72 | 73 | 74 | 75 | 76 | 77 | 78 | 79 | 80 | 81 | 82 | 83 | 84 | 85 | 86 | 87 | 88 | 89 | 90 | 91 | 92 | 93 | 94 | 95 | 96 | 97 | 98 | 99 | 100 | 101 | 102 | 103 | >>
| 
