The Conscientious Court in Russia is a provincial law enforcement body created on the initiative of Empress Catherine II in 1775. His education meant additional protection of the rights of citizens in certain types of cases. The idea of this court was based on the principle of "natural justice". Read more about this, as well as the meaning and reasons for creating a conscientious court in Russia, in the article presented.
On the need for just laws
The Conscientious Court was established by Catherine II under the influence of the ideas of progressive French thinkers of that time, which, for example, included C. Montesquieu, D. Diderot, Voltaire, J.-J. Rousseau. At the same time, she had personal correspondence with the last three.
It was especially influenced by Montesquieu's famous work "On the Spirit of the Laws". In it, in particular, he wrote that laws created by people should be preceded by fair relations between them.
The main theme of the political and legal theory created by this thinker, and the main value that it defends, is political freedom. And in order to ensure this freedom, it is necessarycreate fair laws and organize the statehood properly.
On Natural Law
it was necessary to abhor oppression.
In order to better understand the thought of Catherine II, it would be appropriate to recall that natural law means a certain ideal legal complex that nature itself allegedly prescribed, and it is speculatively present in the human mind.
The number of inalienable human rights includes: the human right to life, liberty, security, dignity of the person. It should be noted that theories based on natural law inherently oppose the so-called civil law, which characterizes the ideal “natural order”, to the existing legal orders.
Such a system was conceived in two versions. The first is a kind of a priori logical premise. The second is the state of nature, which once preceded the social and state order, which was created by people arbitrarily in the form of a social contract.
Tasks and regulations
Based on these theoretical premises, such practical requirements were imposed on a conscientious court as:
- Monitoring the lawfulness of the detention of the accused.
- Trying to reconcile the parties.
- Removal from the general courts of the additional burden of dealing with cases characterized by crimes of not too significant public danger.
The staff of the court consisted of six assessors, two people from each of the existing classes - noble, urban, rural. Some of the civil cases were considered to reconcile the parties, such as disputes over the division of property between relatives.
As for the criminal cases handled by this court, they concerned:
- underage citizens;
- insane;
- deaf-mutes;
- witchcraft;
- bestiality;
- theft of church property;
- harboring offenders;
- causing light bodily harm;
- acts committed under particularly unfavorable circumstances.
Klyuchevsky about the competence of the court
In the "Course of Russian History", published in 1904, O. Klyuchevsky wrote about this court:
- The jurisdiction of the provincial conscientious court was to consider both criminal and civil cases, which were of a special nature.
- From the criminal ones, he was in charge of those in which the source of the crime was not a conscious criminal will, but misfortune, moral or physical deficiency, dementia, infancy, fanaticism, superstition, and the like.
- From the civilians he wasthose with whom the litigants themselves applied to him are subordinate. In these cases, the judges were supposed to promote their reconciliation.
In conclusion, it should be noted that the decisions of the conscientious court had no legal force in property disputes. If the consent of the defendants to the settlement was not obtained, the claim was transferred to a court of general jurisdiction. The judicial instance we have considered was abolished by the Senate in 1866.
Its significance was that, on the one hand, the courts of general jurisdiction were unloaded, and on the other hand, not only legislative norms, but also “natural justice” were taken into account when making decisions.
An interesting fact is that the famous playwright A. N. Ostrovsky, who studied law at Moscow University, but did not graduate from it, served for some time in the Moscow Conscientious Court as a clerk. And although he regarded this service as a duty, he performed it extremely conscientiously.
