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Major General of Justice Vladimir Markin, head of Directorate of Media Relations in the Russia’s Investigative Committee has today congratulated his colleagues on 30^th anniversary of press services in the system of Ministry of Internal Affairs.

We bring to your attention the text of Mr. Markin’s speech at the stately meeting:

“There are still a lot of problems in the law enforcement system, including regular ones. We, colleagues, cannot by ourselves make the picture as beautiful as we or our superiors would like to. But a lot depends on us, especially public attitude to our agencies and that means psychological state of our staff on which the speed of positive processes depends.”

“Recently psychologists carried out an experiment in one of the schools. Read some text, selected at random a quarter of students and told teachers that they were very gifted children. After that the teachers started treating those students better. But most important, six months later the specialists measured the objective results and saw that all of those students studied much better. They believed in themselves as well.”

“Quite the same way, we together with our colleagues from media tell about how good our police officers, our investigators, our lawyers in general are, even though we color the truth a bit, we help everybody to become better. And vice-versa if we use only black colors, as it was twenty years ago, the result was alike.”

“We should defend the honor of our colleagues and fellow workers against slander, misrepresentations, deliberate lies and pressure at least for these psychological reasons. This is necessary also to be able in a few cases not to be afraid to cry stinking fish, to call the evil – evil and bad officials – bad. And to be scared that the stain covers everybody. On the contrary, the stain will be removed and that will turn positive for the whole of the system.”

“The longer I work in this position, the more I become convinced, that it is we, colleagues, who have duty and honor to be guides and preachers of principles of constitutional state.”

“Alas, a lot of writers of political essays and human rights activists in fact turn out guides of destructive not constitutional ideas. Our human rights advisors support out-and-out extremists putting them on the same level with defenders of not only the state, but of legal order. Or there is another recent example – undisguised lobbying by experts in the rights of interests of convicts for serious crimes and not for free. It is paradoxical, but regular human rights activists are guided by revolutionary sense of justice, including the idea that the worse for the state, the better for the next revolution. Meanwhile, in the formula “legal state”, the word “legal” is adjective to the noun “state” and to any other – be it revolution, chaos or civil war. So we need to take care of our state as a basic value and only then we can bring in even more top values of Law.”

“We have to admit that it often happens that the public attention to our agencies and ourselves is raised by others’ grieves or mistakes. The fate willed that our colleagues are the ones who have to deal with those problems and we – to tell about it. However, it depends on us to use every case and even every scandal for positive purposes, to promote legal values. This use of official position is not only normal, but highly necessary for our society. Some people, it appears, just like that rowdy in a plain do not listen to anybody except us.”

“Maybe the most important principle of legal state, which should be promoted, to which the citizens should be schooled without any exceptions is unconditional respect for defenders of legal order. Even if somebody of our colleagues shows not the best qualities, there is a notion of the honor of the regiment, which means not the concealment of the drawbacks, but the demand to the citizens to respect status, shoulder strips and judge’s gowns. This includes in the first place the respect form the law enforcement officials themselves and without any exceptions be it a very popular star or powerful politicians.”

“Any attack on the police officer, encroachment on the investigator, offence of the court, etc., should be prevented in the toughest way and all the society should remember that independent on social status or special national features. Otherwise there will be no order in the country.”