MOSCOW, May 2 (RAPSI) – The Supreme Court of Russia on Tuesday submitted a bill to the State Duma proposing to reduce the procedure for reading of court verdicts in all criminal cases, according to the database of the parliament’s lower house.

The bill may introduce changes to the Russian Criminal Procedure Code establishing that a court only reads the introductory and conclusory parts of the sentence or ruling made as the outcome of a trial. The proposed change is supposed to reduce the procedure for announcing a verdict, which consumes an unreasonable amount of time in a number of cases.

Authors of the bill note that although such reduced procedure applies to a certain number of cases, such as ones related to terrorism, it is not used because these cases often contain elements of other crimes requiring full reading. In addition, in many cases not subjected to reduced procedure, especially ones related to serial crimes against a person or those involving groups of people, may require days or weeks of verdict’s reading by a court.

According to the note attached to the bill, this measure will not limit rights of trial participants as they would be able to get a copy of verdict or other similar document within 15 days after the reading and appeal the ruling if necessary.