What Happened
In 2024, a significant number of judicial decisions temporarily disappeared from public access on the kad.arbitr.ru arbitration case index website. Some rulings were removed as part of a classification regime; others disappeared due to technical maintenance. Some decisions were subsequently restored; others were not.
This gave rise to a series of practical questions: what should a lawyer do when a precedent has “vanished”? How can established practice be proved? How are courts responding?
Why This Matters
Russian law is formally not a precedent-based system: courts are not required to follow decisions from other courts. In practice, however:
- Supreme Court positions are quasi-binding — lower courts generally follow them,
- established practice of the commercial (arbitrazh) circuit courts creates predictable expectations for the parties,
- notable individual decisions are used as arguments in court even when they are not formally binding precedents.
When a decision is unavailable in the database, its existence becomes harder to demonstrate, citation becomes harder to justify, and a court may simply decline to accept an argument citing an inaccessible document.
What to Do When a Needed Decision Has Disappeared
Request a copy from the court. Any party may apply to the arbitration court that issued the decision requesting a certified copy. This is slower than searching the database, but it works.
Use commercial legal databases. ConsultantPlus and Garant regularly index court rulings and frequently retain copies of decisions that have been removed from public access.
Cite Supreme Court positions rather than lower-court rulings. Plenum and Presidium resolutions of the Supreme Court are published on the Court’s official website and do not disappear from access. If a Supreme Court position covers your situation, it carries more weight than any lower-court decision.
Document the fact of inaccessibility. If you cite a decision in a submission and it is unavailable, capture a screenshot recording the unavailability — this shows the court that you acted in good faith.
Limitation Periods and “Disappeared” Cases
A separate question arises concerning limitation periods when procedural steps were taken in a case that has since been classified. The general rule: procedural deadlines do not depend on the public availability of a ruling. The limitation period and appeal windows run regardless of whether the decision is published in the database or not.
If you are a party to a case that has become closed, your deadlines run from the date you were personally served with a copy of the judicial act, not from the date of its publication.
The Wider Problem
The disappearance of court practice from public access is not merely a technical failure. It is a symptom of the incremental closure of the judicial system. The number of cases classified as “for official use only” or “secret” in commercial courts has grown. This makes legal outcome prediction harder for businesses and increases the value of legal advisers who track practice in real time.
Read Also
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Handling a case where the practice you need is unavailable or classified? Contact us for a consultation — we will help identify analogous positions and build an argument from accessible sources.