9/7 Tass 96
MOSCOW, July 9 (Itar-Tass) —— More than 190,500 police officers have passed recertification, Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev said on Saturday, July 9.
He chaired a meeting with the newly appointed heads of departments at the Interior Ministry’s headquarters. Up to date, 286 officials have passed recertification and been appointed to senior positions. Ninety-one of them are serving at the central headquarters, including 27 heads of the main departments, directorates and divisions.
“Currently, 1,195 certification commissions are working. They have held 2,284 meetings and re-certified 190,576 police officers,” Nurgaliyev said.
He said earlier that a better personnel policy was one of the key aspects of reform and a number of practical steps had already been taken.
“On instructions from the president of Russia, a new mechanism has been devised for carrying out the policy of filling senior positions in the Russian Interior Ministry system. Currently, a top position cannot remain vacant for more than three months, and should be filled from among the federal personnel pool made up of senior officials who have been trained over the past two years at the Russian Interior Ministry’s Academy of Management,” Nurgaliyev said.
According to President Dmitry Medvedev, Interior Ministry personnel will have to meet the most stringent requirements, with special attention to be paid to checking police officers for professional competence and aptitude.
“The personal qualities of police personnel must be in line with the most stringent requirements,” the president said. “This is clear to one and all.”
He believes it is “fundamentally important to ensure people with drug or alcohol addiction and with unbalanced character should have no chance of getting police jobs.”
“Every employee will be obliged to declare one’s income, the income of the spouse and children, and information about owned property,” the president recalled.
He also suggested giving thought to establishing a special examination to test the police officers’ knowledge of regulatory acts, in the first place, the Constitution.
Nurgaliyev also said that the Russian Interior Ministry should move away from repressive methods or its reform will not achieve the set goals.
On December 24, 2009, Medvedev signed a decree on measures to improve the work of law enforcement agencies. He described the document as “the beginning of serious Interior Ministry reform” and said its “first and most important steps will be optimisation of the structure and composition of the ministry”.
The ministry’s staff should be reduced by 20 percent by January 2, 2012. Starting that year, public security police will be financed only from the federal budget.
On January 12, 2010, Medvedev signed another decree that created a legal framework for the operation of the Interior Ministry after optimisation.
Fighting corruption and ensuring public order are the main objectives of the Russian Interior Ministry. All of other functions that are “duplicating, excessive and alien to police” should be excluded, according to Medvedev’s Decree “On Some Measures to Reform the Ministry of Interior Affairs of the Russian Federation”.