A lawyer is an independent professional advisor on legal matters

I don’t like it when lawyers are called human rights defenders, as if the two terms were synonyms. And it’s not just that in the post-Soviet space, “human rights defender” is a distinct profession—more of a civic activist than a lawyer. When my fellow lawyers themselves talk about defending rights—and about how important those rights are and what value they hold—it grates on my ears. I don’t believe that our profession is about defending rights. It’s about defending people; rights are merely a tool for us.

I’ve seen many times what the defense of human rights looks like when separated from the person themselves. The defendant is brought to court from the detention center. Most likely, he’s hungry and sleep-deprived, because he was taken from his cell at 5 a.m. to make it in time for the morning hearing. The police van in which he was transported is either very hot or very cold—it’s always stuffy and cramped. Perhaps he is sick. Perhaps he was beaten in his cell. If this is his first court appearance, he is almost certainly under immense stress and does not understand what is happening or what to expect. None of this interests either the judge or the prosecutor. However, they are concerned with ensuring his rights are respected.

- Defendant, when were you given a copy of the indictment? Don’t you remember? Try to recall, and in the meantime, we’ll call the detention center’s office to check.

Because if the copy was handed to you less than seven days ago, that’s very bad. It’s a violation of the right to a defense. Under no circumstances can the court or the prosecutor allow this to happen. But everything else described above, they can and do allow. “A lawyer is an independent professional advisor on legal matters”—that’s the wording in our law. It explains why the state tolerates us and what it generally expects from us. But it defines neither the limits nor the fundamental essence of what we do when we defend a client in a criminal case. Legal advice can only be effective to the extent that the state and each of its representatives (investigators, prosecutors, judges) seriously consider themselves bound by the law and are guided by it. Not to mention that the law itself can be cruel and absurd. The slave trade and the Holocaust were, in their time, entirely legal, and we have not come so far since then that we can place too much reliance on the law and regard the human dimension in court as something of lesser importance.