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March 2002

Judicial fudge and all that

Firstly my apologies that it has been a while since the news has been updated, as I announced on the forum I have been very busy finishing off coursework for university, but thankfully that's all completed now.

The main story over the past week has undoubtedly been the trial (or lack thereof) of Yuri Andropov. Up until Tuesday the court has been listening to evidence to see if there was a basis for a trial, and set the trial itself to be heard in a live chat session on Wednesday. Unfortunately for various reasons nobody was able to make it there, including the commissar for Justice himself Valentin Grozni. The two judges who were there however decided to acquit the defendant on the basis that no one was at the trial.

Immediately following the announcement on Thursday was a storm of protest based primarily on the facts that the defendant had already confessed and thus couldn't be found not guilty, that the trial could not be finished because the third judge was not consulted in deciding the verdict, and that a lack of public interest was no basis for ending a trial anyway. The commissar for Justice has announced that the trial will continue and comrade Justice Sokath has accepted this, though at the time of writing this the third justice - Conrad Cromien - has not, and in doing so has caused quite an outrage.

Posted by Siberian Fox

New forums go live

A great day indeed for the U.S.S.R. as our brand new bulletin board opened to the public today! The new board has actually been up and running since Monday when comrade Sergei put the army to work on civilian matters and managed to get our MySQL database set up. The past two days have been spent on preparations, with the Central Executive Committee voting on the arrangement of the new forums and graphics and other details being set up.

Our new bulletin board has a great many advantages over the old one. For starters it's much faster (or at least I find it is) and as it is hosted on our own website it can be fully integrated to include up-to-the-second automatically updated community news headlines. It is also a lot cheaper - i.e. FREE. Our only costs now are our web hosting.

Of course like everything else around here the launch didn't quite go without a hitch. Yuri V Andropov - who has confessed to deleting one of our websites in January - tried to register everyone else's username before they logged on. However State Security quickly apprehended him and deleted the accounts from the database so they are free to be registered by their rightful owners. The names included Red Liberator and Kuralyov.

Posted by Siberian Fox

Criminal Justice Act Passes

By a unanimous vote of the Central Executive Committee yesterday evening the Criminal Justice act was passed into law in the Soviet Union! At long last our nation has something by way of legal structure in which to operate a court system, and so civil proceedings can finally take the place of military 'rough justice'.

The Act outlines the basic format of trials, rules regarding evidence and the method for appointment of judges. Now that the act is passed the nation awaits Justice Commissar Valentin Grozni to select the nations first two judges. A number of comrades have volunteered or been nominated, including comrades Kuralyov, William Howard, Dampier, The Unknown Comrad and Conrad Cromien.

There was a slight scuffle at the ballot box after comrade TUC announced that voting was over because the deadline set by the chairman for voting had passed. Comrades Lord General MB and SoKatH questioned the amount of time given to votes but former chairman Red-Liberator was adamant that the deadline was final. Of course it was all a genuine misunderstanding, as the vote was not given six hours as comrade MB had thought but had started a full 24 hours earlier, meaning the vote actually was open for a full 30 hours to give comrades from all time zones a chance to vote.

Already there are some ideas floating to extend the justice system, stemming from concern over judges showing bias in a trial and possibly setting overly harsh sentences as a result.

In other news, a minor embarrassment on my part as I forgot to include an entire bill in the law section of the site. Rest assured however that the Personality Worship act now has its pride of place as the first bill passed by the C.E.C.

Posted by Siberian Fox

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