Voice of Beslan Appeal Found Extremist

On April 22, 2010, it became known that the appeal "To all who sympathize with the victims of Beslan terrorist attack' by Voice of Beslan was after all blacklisted as extremist. Voice of Beslan is a grassroots non-governmental organization appeared in the aftermath of the 2004 North Ossetian Beslan school hostage crisis. It comprises a part of the Mothers of Beslan support and advocacy group of relatives of the victims. The organization was created in response to what they see as the incompetence and excessive force used by the security services, especially with regard to the firing from tanks and flame throwers at the school. On November 30, 2005, Voice of Beslan appealed to the European Union and the European Parliament as well as the US president and the Congress for international investigation of the attack.

The fact of the appeal's ban only came into light due to the text's inclusion into the Federal List of Extremist Materials the new version of which appeared on the site of the Ministry of Justice on April 22. But the ruling itself had been passed as early as October 15, 2009 by Pravoberezhny local court of the city of Beslan, the Republic of North Ossetia-Alania (Pravoberezhny local court of the Republic of North Ossetia-Alania, as stated in the List, probably by mistake).

We should point out that the appeal caused the prosecutor's office of Ingushetia to demand the ban of the Voice of Beslan organization itself. The case was started in 2007. The prosecutor's office found symptoms of extremism in the text for it allegedly contained "deliberately false accusation against president Putin for aiding terrorists and being a warrantor for criminals' (for the SOVA Center's opinion on the matter see). One of the features of the collision is that while persecuting the organization for a text published in 2005 a legal rule created in 2006 was tried. We should stress that the matter was the persecution of the organization not the banning of the text as extremist.

By the start of the hearings in March, 2008, the authors of the appeal were removed from leadership by the Supreme Court of the Republic of North Ossetia-Alania. Having lost their artificial person they went on under a new name of Voice of Beslan All-Russian Public Organization of Terror Act Victims. Activists of the new unregistered organization were not admitted to the hearings. The defendant was the Voice of Beslan organization registered in name of Marina Melikova in February, 2008.

The latest information on the case was that at the very beginning of the hearings, on March 21, 2008, the court ruled to re-examine the appeal.

Ella Kesayeva, leader of the Voice of Beslan All-Russian Public Organization of Terror Act Victims, told the SOVA Center on April 22, 2010 that by October, 2009 when the ruling on the ban of the text was passed the organization headed by Marina Melikova had been already abolished and the case of Voice of Beslan thus had come to naught.

As it was stated above, the representatives of the Voice of Beslan All-Russian Public Organization of Terror Act Victims were not admitted to the hearings of the case on the ban despite the activists' claims on the authorship of the text. Ella Kesayeva and the activists of her organization had been informed about the court hearings taking place on October 15, 2009 but she only found out the results on April 22 when the Federal List of Extremist Materials was updated, just as we did.