MOSCOW, June 28 - RAPSI. Courts delete significant information from their rulings while posting them online, thus rendering them irrelevant, Mikhail Pozdnyakov, a research fellow at the European University's Institute for the Rule of Law in St. Petersburg, wrote in an article for the Vedomosti newspaper on Thursday.

A law obliging courts to publish their decisions on the Internet was adopted in late 2008 to more readily hear public opinion and to more quickly develop judicial practice. In the context of non-stop legislative changes, both goals are important. The law was enacted on July 1, 2010.
Commercial courts made their rulings accessible even before the law.

In Pozdnyakov's view, problems are most frequently found with common law courts. Eight percent of these courts in major regional cities and 15 percent in less densely populated areas do not provide access to their rulings. On average, common law courts publish only half their decisions. A total of 5.5 percent of these courts have not published a single judgment in 2012.

More and more courts are failing to publish their rulings, he stressed.

Meanwhile, one-third of the posted rulings have no citation number, and 10 percent are without any date. This makes retrieving the respective document impossible for interested readers. 

At the same time, one-third to half of all rulings do not contain sufficient information for their legal analysis. This makes their online publication meaningless, Pozdnyakov said.