Misuse of anti-extremism in September 2013

The following is our review of the primary and most representative events in the misuse of Russia’s anti-extremist legislation in September 2013.

LawmakingAt the end of September, President Putin introduced to the State Duma a draft law providing a complex set of new counter-terrorism measures. The law proposes, inter alia, the criminalization of organizing and joining a terrorist conspiracy or continuing the activities of an organization banned for terrorism. The proposal is entirely in line with Criminal Code Articles 282.1 and 282.2, correspondingly, but provides a far more severe punishment than Article 282.2 is it currently stands. As it is already common to see people prosecuted for connection with organizations illegally banned, we expect the practice to continue with greater magnitude.

Criminal prosecution

In early September the Central Investigation Department of the Investigative Committee reported that a case under Part 1 of Article 282 was filed against two members of rock group The Bloodhound Gang and other unspecified persons. The Investigative Committee rated the desecration of the Russian flag (which one of the group’s member put in his during a concert in Odessa, Ukraine) as a humiliation of Russian citizens’ national dignity. We do not agree with such an interpretation, as in Russia’s Criminal Code the word “national” has been always regarded as “ethnic,” not as “civil.” For citizens’ protection in such cases, we have Criminal Code Article 329: desecration of the Russian state flag or emblem.

At the end of September, the Chelyabinsk region Investigative Committee started a case under Part 1 of Article 282 over Islamist party Hizb ut-Tahrir’s distribution of leaflets, placement of banners with quotations from the Koran, and posters protesting the ban of a popular Koran translation (see below) in the streets of Chelyabinsk. We note that neither Islamic scripture, nor such posters as “Islam is banned in Russia” and “Muslims, we are 20 million in Russia and our Koran is banned!” can be regarded as extremist. As to Hizb ut-Tahrir’s leaflets, their dissemination is punishable in Russia because the party is banned – but the accused are almost never prosecuted under Article 282 (inciting hate). The leaflets could hardly provoke ethnic or religious hatred.

In September we became aware that Arkhangelsk Region Pomors’ Association president Ivan Moseev, fined under Part 1 Article 282, faced all but total deprivation of his rights as a result of the court’s sentence. According to Moseev himself, in early September he was fired from the local university and lost his office as director of Pomor Instituteof Indigenous Peoples and Minorities of the North. He was also expelled from all the Russian civil organizations of which he had been a member. His name had been earlier put into the Rosfinmonitoring list of organizations and individuals involved in terrorist and extremist activity, and now Russian banks refuse to establish accounts for him. We view all these measures as wrongful, for they are based upon an illegal sentence. We remind readers that Moseev had been accused of leaving a commentary on the website Echo of the North under the pseudonym Pomors that was insulting to ethnic Russians. While the comment, which we have reviewed, does exhibit hate speech, it contains no basis for criminal prosecution.

Administrative prosecution

We are aware of three people illegally fined in September under Article 20.29 of the Administrative Code for the distribution of materials banned as extremist. They were library director from Sergiev Posad, who was prosecuted for keeping a banned Jehovah’s Witnesses brochure in the library (for the gap between the anti-extremist legislation and the law on libraries see http://www.sova-center.ru/misuse/news/persecution/2012/06/d24749/ (in Russian)); a shop owner from Menzelinsk (Tatarstan) fined for selling a wrongfully banned collection of prayers “Fortress of the Muslim;” and a prisoner from a penal colony in Adygeysk who had reportedly given a medieval religious treatise “40 Hadith” banned on unclear grounds to two of his fellow convicts.

Bans on extremist grounds

In the beginning of the month it became known that Tsentralny District Court of Novosibirsk found Artem Loskutov’s icon-style picture depicting Pussy Riot members to be “information insulting citizens’ religious feelings which is banned from distribution in Russia.” The sentence has entered into force. Thus, the picture will be put into the federal list of information banned for distribution on the Internet. We remind readers that Loskutov had been found guilty under Part 2 of Article 5.26 of Administrative Code (offending religious feelings) for posting the pictures on ad boards in the center of Novosibirsk. The Zheleznodorozhny district prosecutor’s office based its lawsuit against the picture upon the law “On Information,” which bans the distribution of information that could be grounds for criminal or administrative prosecution. Nevertheless, we see the court’s decision as wrongful. We regard Loskutov’s sentence under Part 2 Article 5.26 as inappropriate, as we see no offense in his activity.

In mid-September it was reported that early in August the Tsentralny District Court of Tver banned the official Jehovah’s Witnesses’ jw.org as extremist. The decision has not come into force yet. The site contains texts from several Jehovah’s Witnesses’ brochures that have been illegally banned as extremist.

During the same period, the Birobidzhan District Court banned the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ brochure “Good News from God.” This decision has also not yet come into force. As usual, the text was banned on the grounds that the authors promote the uniqueness or superiority of their religion over others, though such ideas are common to believers and have nothing to do with extremism.

The most striking event in the field of misuse of anti-extremism was the scandalous sentence issued by the Oktyabrsky District Court of Novorossiysk on September 17. The court accepted a claim brought by the city transport prosecutor’s office, banning the book “The Meaning of the Holy Koran in the Russian language.” This interpretive translation of the Koran by a well-known Azerbaijani Muslim philosopher is very popular with Russian Muslims. According to the expert assessment cited by the court, the book contained “statements in which a person or group of persons (in particular, non-Muslims) is portrayed negatively on grounds related to a particular religion; statements which address talking about the advantages of a single person or group of persons to other people on the grounds of religion (particularly Muslims over non-Muslims); statements containing the positive assessment of hostile action of one group of people against another group of people on the basis of religion, specifically, Muslims towards non-Muslims; statements of an inciting character, which can be understood as calling for hostile and violent actions by one group of people against another group of people on the basis of religion, in particular the Muslims towards non-Muslims.” Obviously, such observations can be made on the majority of ancient religious literature; however, they do not justify banning the holy scriptures of the world’s religions.

Nothing could embarrass the court, though, and it went as far as to note in the decision that the book must be destroyed. We note that the book contains translations of the Koran with parallel Arabic text. Thus, enforcement of the court’s decision means the destruction of the Arabic text, which is utterly unacceptable for Muslims.

Not surprisingly, the court’s decision provoked resentment from the majority of Russia’s Muslim leaders. The Council of Muftis of Russia officially demanded in an open letter to President Putin that the decision be reversed. Some religious figures said they do not accept Kuliev’s translation for they see it as Salafist-leaning, yet they all the same note that the current practice of banning authoritative Islamic literature in Russia is dangerous development.

On September 23, Ravil Tugushev, a lawyer, appealed the decision. He pointed that it was issued with procedural violations as civil and religious organizations were kept away from the proceedings. Tugushev applied for the participation of the Spiritual Board of Muslims in the European Part of Russia in the appellate hearing as an interested party. Tugushev said that the decision on the ban is a precedent that could entail bans on other translations of the Koran, and even the Arabic original, as well as the prohibition of confessing Islam as it is based on the Koran.

Other government actions

In early September we became aware that the Sovetsky district prosecutor’s office of Kazan issued a warning to a local after he posted “a picture with Nazi swastika, a skull and a building with legend ‘Fascington: worthy successors of the Third Reich’” on social network VKontakte. It has always been Sova’s position that demonstration of Nazi symbols for purposes other than propaganda of Nazism should not be subject to prosecution. This time, the picture was very clearly meant to conflate the current leadership of the United States with the Third Reich, not to advocate Nazism.

During the same period, the prosecutor’s office of Leninsky district of Grozny reported a warning issued to Khamzat Khozhbakhmadov, head of the local Al-Koran madrasa in connection with a dubious requirement to keep a Federal List of Extremist Materials. However, as the prosecutor’s office did not report that it had found any banned books during a “check” of the madrasa, obviously there had not been any. As civil religious educational institutions, madrasas are not obliged to keep the Federal List of Extremist Materials on hand. We believe the warning is unjustified.

Early in September Roskomnadzor, the media oversight agency, issued a warning to the editors and promoters of Petrozavodsk TV company Sampo for distributing information on the issue of a Karelian national currency in a news program. Roskomnadzor regarded the story as a threat against the Russian state’s integrity. The trifling news story was about an action by the Free Karelia movement’s members who had issued Karelian “runes” that could be used as souvenirs for tourists or turned over at art performances. The occasion was the anniversary of the declaration of Karelian state sovereignty. On August 9, 1990, the parliament of the republic declared its intention to build a democratic, lawful sovereign state as part of the Russian Soviet Republic and the USSR. Free Karelia is not a separatist, but a regionalist movement promoting regional civil self-government and cultural self-determination. It shows no illegal activity. There is no doubt at this time that Roskomnadzor’s claims of separatism are groundless.

During the same period, the prosecutor’s office of Tatarstan issued a warning to Rais Suleimanov, head of the Privolzhsky Center for Religious and Ethno-Religious Studies of the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies. The matter was one of Suleimanov’s publications focused on the closure of the Kazan mosque Al-Ikhlas and the rise of radical Islamists in the republic. Prosecutors accused the author of using false data, lacking substantiation of the purported rise of Wahhabism in the republic, and exaggerating certain extremist incidents while omitting the law enforcement agencies’ activities on suppressing extremism. The prosecutors claimed that Suleimanov’s article attempts to pit residents of Tatarstan against each other on the basis of nation and religion, thereby inciting hate against people of certain nations or confessions. The warning is adequate from our point of view, as certain theses by Suleimanov do actually threaten to incite hate against migrants and religious minorities. We believe such analytics could potentially provoke the inappropriate use of Russia’s anti-extremism law as well.