A few years later, when legislators got serious about revising the Criminal Procedure Code, crisis center Syostri again raised concerns with Russian policymakers and international observers about how reforms would impact rape victims.32 The Soviet code, as an essential part of the totalitarian system, had what legal scholars call an accusatorial bias, in reality a presumption of guilt, leading to incredibly low rates of acquittal at trial, 0.4 percent even into the 1990s (Solomon 2005, 90). Although an obstacle to human rights in general, for victims of rape, the Syostri director argued, this bias had the benefit of facilitating prosecution. In such a system, the man on trial for rape—standing in a cage after a lengthy pretrial detention, deprived of any sort of real legal defense, and forced to listen to charges (often read out loud by the judge) crafted by a prosecutor with almost unlimited investigatory powers—had virtually no way of undermining the accuser’s credibility, a common tactic in rape trials elsewhere. The bias against anybody caught up in the system, combined with strong incentives for indictments and convictions, overrode much skepticism toward rape victims that Soviet police and prosecutors surely had. This accusatorial bias was the central concern of international rule-of-law and human rights organizations, such as the ABA- CEELI and the Council of Europe, who by the late 1990s were actively pressuring for reform. Considering how democratic systems have allowed legal procedure to protect men’s right to inflict bodily harm against some women (Estrich
1987; Pateman 1988; Elman 1996), gender violence activists’ concern that fostering a presumption of innocence might create a similar bias against sexual assault victims in Russia was reasonable.
The sexual assault activists’ concerns fell on deaf ears. U. S. organizations and officials raised no gender issues. The Duma commitment charged with reforming the code issued no response to Syostri’s repeated pleas. Women’s crisis center activists were not even allowed to attend parliamentary hearings. As a result, without acknowledging that women’s rights were excluded, leading jurists portrayed the new code as a compromise “between concerns with human rights and the interests of the agencies that uncover crimes” (Solomon 2005, 77). To the degree that the accusatorial bias was lessened and there were no new provisions countering the institutionalized skepticism toward rape, the new code provides the police and medical examiners even more opportunities to avoid helping women. In contrast to the global feminist consensus, this reform illustrates that, in some important ways, many Russian and international human rights advocates have not fully incorporated women’s rights into their conception of human rights.
There were no other changes to the procedures for rape or sexual harassment. For example, another problem was that the Soviet procedural code distinguished “simple rape” from other types of violent crimes by stipulating that this kind of rape case is initiated in no other circumstances than when a victim brings a complaint (i960 RSFSR Criminal Procedure Code, Art. 27). Much as for domestic violence victims in the United States, this difference meant that rape victims were particularly vulnerable to pressure from their rapists to withdraw their complaints. The new criminal procedural code also maintains the distinction between simple rape and all other forms of violent crime (Russian Federation Criminal Procedure Code, promulgated July 1, 2002, article 20.3).