Russian Attorneys celebrate professional holiday

May 31 is celebrated annually as Attorney Day in Russia. Unofficial professional holiday was established in 2005 by the Second Russian Attorney Convention to commemorate the adoption of  the  Federal law #63-FZ “On attorney services and and bar association in the Russian Federation” on the 31^st of 2002. This year marks the 10^th anniversary of the adoption.

Evgeniy Semenyako, the President of the Federal Chamber of Attorneys of the Russian Federation, notes, that through 10 years of implementation the Law has proven to be an invaluable legal instrument.

“Russian attorneys finally got the law, that fulfilled the aspirations of many generations of Russian attorneys,” says Mr. Semenyako. “We united under the self-governing association, received legal guarantees of independence, the right to determine if a lawyer is worthy of becoming an attorney and the right to expel the ones who are not. We established the rules of professional conduct, formalized in the Attorney Code of Ethics, adopted on the basis of the statute law. Due to the vast experience in implementation the general standards of attorney practice as well as corporate culture have been developed.”

Statistically, 66,524 attorneys have been registered in Russia in 2011 alone. About 50% of these attorneys have provided free-of-charge services to over 160,000 of the disadvantaged. Besides, the attorneys worked as public defenders in over 2,000,000 of cases, which is more than 60% of the total number of cases investigated by law enforcement agencies and tried in courts.