On Tuesday 22 January CILC took part in a roundtable in Samara that was organized by its Russian project partner PILnet. This roundtable hosted by the Samara Bar Chamber brought together representatives of various regional institutions that work on legal aid, such as the Samara Ombudsperson, Samara regional parliament, the Ministry of Justice, and several legal clinics, as well as representatives of the Bar Chamber of Ulyanovsk and the Sverdlovskaya Ombudsperson’s office. The roundtable focused on regional legal aid systems in Russia, their development and best practices.
The federal law on legal aid, its regional implementation, regional legislation, coordination activities of different legal aid providers, quality in legal aid, and the future of Russian legal aid were high on the agenda. The input of the various participants will be used in making recommendations for regions on implementing good regional legal aid systems responsive to citizens needs.
On Thursday 24 January CILC and PILnet staged the fourth and last project steering committee meeting in Moscow. Together with representatives of the Federal bar Chamber and the Netherlands Embassy in Moscow the project team discussed the project progress and the remaining activities. In the last month the team will be focused on finalizing an advisory note for the Ministry of Justice on quality in legal aid, publishing the results of the project in a reader, and organizing the project’s closing conference.
This roundtable meeting in Samara and the steering committee meeting are part of the multi-annual Dutch-Russian project Implementing the civil legal aid system in Russia that is funded by the MATRA programme of the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs.