Russia's Popular Front has proposed prohibiting the sale of alcohol to customers under 21 years old.
Nikolai Fyodorov, who is drafting the Popular Front's programme, shared his proposals with Izvestia after presenting them to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. He said he wants most of all for traffic police to be honest and for all Russians to be sober.
Fyodorov, a former member of parliament and the head of the Institute of Socioeconomic and Political Studies, met with Putin, the client for this programme, on August 11. The prime minister asked him to intensify the work on a joint election programme for the Popular Front and the United Russia party, and supported the proposal to call it the "People's Programme."
The programme will be presented for nationwide discussion in late August, Fyodorov told Izvestia. One of the issues that the people working on the programme want to discuss with the public (it isn't yet included in the document) is the question of raising the legal drinking age. The proposal is to follow the US example and increase it from 18 to 21, while also authorizing regional governments to impose restrictions.
"This is a complex and controversial issue," Fyodorov told Izvestia. "According to the Constitution, regional authorities cannot restrict the rights of legally capable individuals in any way. On the other hand, giving them more authority seems like the right thing to do. In a federative state that includes very different constituent entities, such as Chukotka and Dagestan, there should be more differentiation in the decision-making process."
Therefore one way to approach the drinking age issue could be to adopt a federal law authorising the regions to set their own drinking regulations, possibly through regional referenda.
The introduction of drinking restrictions was not smooth in the United States either. The US Constitution does not allow federal authorities to interfere in areas that are outside their competence. Any federal law that set the legal drinking age at 21 would have been immediately overturned by the Supreme Court. Therefore, the Congress worked out the following solution: in 1984, it proposed for each state to raise the drinking age voluntarily. Those states that failed to do so, however, would receive a cut in their road construction financing. When the case went to the Supreme Court, they ruled that the Constitution does not prevent Congress from putting forth any conditions during budget planning. By 1988, every state had introduced the drinking age restriction.
Boris Titov, head of the Business Russia (Delovaya Rossia) organisation, which is now part of the Popular Front, dismissed Fyodorov's proposal as "ineffective" and "premature."
"Russia has recently adopted a package of laws restricting the sale of alcohol. We haven't even had a chance to see how they work yet, and we are already talking about drafting more. The severity of Russian law is notoriously compensated by a failure to carry it out. The more restrictions there are, the more under the table dealing there will be. I don't think we should use the law to discourage people from drinking. We need to change the attitude toward alcohol consumption in society," he said.
"Would people's health improve? Of course it would. Only a fool would say otherwise," argues Leonid Roshal, an expert with the World Health Organization.
In addition to alcohol and tobacco restrictions, the people working on the "People's Programme" propose cancelling the existing "presumption of guilt" of drivers. Currently, a police officer's written evidence cannot be contested in court. To change this situation, they propose legalising the right to use video footage from a camera installed in cars as evidence in court.
"I think it's a good idea to install video cameras in police cars and along the most dangerous parts of the road," Fyodorov adds. He believes this would significantly reduce the abuse of authority by traffic police.
There is also a proposal to combat the practice of police officers who "ambush" drivers at difficult parts of roads in order to collect fines. The plan is to monitor the statistics of violations and to conduct inspections at locations where they seem to peak during a certain period. These inspections would be carried out by a special commission that includes representatives from city halls and public councils. The commission will also check to see if there is any need to reorganise traffic in these locations.
"We are lucky they are only proposing to install these cameras in police cars, and not private cars," lawyer Leonid Olshansky told Izvestia. "With the economic crisis, they are again proposing things that are unlikely to save government money. The courts are already required to accept all evidence. Why go through requiring this again? This "presumption of guilt" of drivers does indeed exist, though. When a camera registers a violation, they charge innocent people, car owners. It would be better to change that."
Alexandra Bayazitova, Yevgeny Yershov