Graph of the day – Why they protest in Khabarovsk
Tens of thousands of the brave citizens of Khabarovsk have taken to the streets to protest the arrest of their governor Furgal. Despite the Kremlin’s attempts to get its preferred governor elected, the people elected Frugal. Furgal who has been a thorn in the Kremlin’s eye was arrested on the 9th of July. The Kremlin claims, through its puppets in the obedient judicial system, that Furgal was involved in murders of businessmen in 2004.
As I showed in this post, the Rule of Law has been effectively hollowed out by Putin since Yeltsin made him president. Russians do not expect the judges in their courts to follow anything but the will of Kremlin.
And that’s why the people in Khabarovsk participate in mass rallies against Putin. They know that Furgal will not get a fair trial. Since Putin became president, Russians’s access to justice has deteriorated (left panel) and at the same time the judges’ decisions increasingly reflect the Kremlin’s view (right panel). Now they as good as always decide according to their masters’ voice.
In Putin’s Russia, people cannot expect justice in courts.
Source: V-Dem https://www.v-dem.net/en/ Note: Access to justice. The indicator ranges from 0 to 1, where 0 indicates that access to justice is denied the citizens of a country and 1 where there are no obstacles. Lower court independence. The indicator ranges from 0 to 4, where 0 indicates that judges’ decisions always reflect government wishes regardless of their sincere view of the legal record and 4 never.
And this is only one of the things in Russia that Putin has destroyed which I showed in this post