According to the plan of the Project implementation on 25 February 2010 in Perm a focus group with Justices of Peace (JP) and court stuff was convened. Nine JPs and ten secretaries of the court participated in the focus group. The participants came from the districts where the legal aid centers were opened.
Session was commenced by Olga Sidorovich (director of the Project) and Vladimir Velyaninov (President of Perm Regional Court) and Irina Bochenkova (President of Judicial Council in perm Region). Olga Sidorovich has thanked representatives of the Perm judiciary for their interest to the Project and underlined that meticulous and profound preliminary work had a definite positive impact to the methodology of the monitoring.
Vladimir Velyaninov underlined the Project importance in the light of strengthening access to justice for the poor and accentuated that poor and vulnerable are certainly in need of special treatment, particularly from the court staff, since the court officers are the first court personal who they meet upon their arrival to the court.
Irina Bochenkova noted with satisfaction that as a result of the travaux préparatoires beneficial cooperation between the Perm judiciary and the Project team has been established. Olga Sidorovich presented a Project with a brief introduction of the Project components, while Project expert Lev Ivanov demonstrated monitoring content, goal, tasks and forms of the main monitoring documents. Team leader of the Project Lyubov Ezhova covered in detail methodology of the monitoring.
In the second part of the session the participants were welcomed to express their opinion of the monitoring and the difficulties that could arise in its implementation. In particular, the most common concern was necessity to consider specific characteristics of each district in the light of availability of sufficient number of civil cases for the monitoring. All the participates supported an idea of providing information on legal aid centers.
