“Has the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation Found a Balance Between Fiscal Interests and Justice?” — an article by Tatyana Tereshchenko for the publication Zakon
An article by Tatyana Tereshchenko, Head of the Analytical Department at Prime Advice Law Offices, for the Legal Chronicle column in the journal Zakon. The column features several notes by different authors on significant legal developments. The authors write about what caught their attention in the legal sphere over the past month.
Since September 8, 2024, Russian state courts have ceased to be inexpensive. This development has sparked widespread concern and discussion within the professional community.
The scale of the changes is truly staggering and resembles shock therapy. For instance, a comparison of the current and previous versions of paragraph 1 of Article 333.21 of the Tax Code reveals that filing a bankruptcy petition for a company now costs 100,000 rubles instead of 6,000 rubles. Challenging the legality of decisions, actions, or inaction by government authorities or officials will set a legal entity back 50,000 rubles in state fees, up from the previous symbolic 3,000 rubles. The new maximum fee for property claims is also telling: instead of the usual 200,000 rubles, the state fee can now reach 10 million rubles if the claim exceeds 50 million rubles.
The legal community is divided between those who support the legislator (citing inflation, reduced strain on the justice system, the assumption that quality judicial proceedings entail higher costs—as in many other countries—and that compensation for expenses should be borne by the losing party, etc.) and those who sympathize with low-income citizens and remain skeptical of the purported benefits of such a decision (the unaffordability of the new fees for disputing parties, a de facto property qualification, the impossibility of improving the quality of judicial decisions simply by raising state fees, the risk of multiplying judicial errors due to the excessive cost of all stages of appellate review, etc.).
While experts debated the correlation between the size of state fees and access to justice, cautiously assessing the initial consequences of the increase, the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation issued Ruling No. 16-P in response to an inquiry from a group of deputies.