Translated material
Off the record
The Moscow City Duma will appeal to the Constitutional Court with a request to ban mentioning the nationality of the defendants during trials
The capital's legislators insist that if the nationality of offenders and criminals disappears from police and court records, this will deprive the “destructive forces” in Russian society of the opportunity to sow interethnic discord. Yesterday, the majority of Moscow City Duma deputies agreed with the initiative of the United Russia faction to appeal to the Constitutional Court to raise the question of the legality of mentioning the nationality of defendants during trials. As the initiator of the request to the Constitutional Court, Chairman of the Moscow City Duma Vladimir Platonov, said, “judges are obliged to find out the identity of the defendant, but do not have the right to find out their nationality.”“According to Article 19 of the Constitution, the state guarantees equality of rights and freedoms of man and citizen, regardless of his nationality,” Mr. Platonov explained his position. “Everyone has the right to determine and indicate their nationality, but no one can be forced to do so.” The deputy believes that the provisions of the Criminal Procedure Code, which provide for the establishment of the nationality of the defendant as one of the characteristics of his personality during the keeping of the court record, are contrary to the Constitution.
If the judges of the Constitutional Court agree that there really is a conflict of laws and consider it necessary to eliminate the contradiction, the speaker of the Moscow City Duma hopes, the mention of nationality will automatically disappear from all police reports. The “nationality” item in modern interrogation forms “migrated” from Soviet times, but today in a country striving for European standards, according to deputies, raising the issue of nationality is “not very decent.”
Let us remind you that this is not the first attempt by the Moscow United Russia members to “deprive” those involved in criminal chronicles of their nationality. At the end of last year, deputies of the Moscow City Duma proposed to their federal colleagues, as a legislative initiative, to introduce a ban on “the dissemination in the media, as well as on computer networks, of information about the nationality of victims, persons who have committed offenses, suspects and accused of crimes.”
According to Vladimir Platonov, these two initiatives are consistent and follow from one another, and the parliamentarians’ motives are the same: to deprive Russian society of the prerequisites for interethnic hostility. After all, the events of last fall in the Karelian Kondopoga (which, by the way, served as the starting point for a tougher migration policy, including the introduction of a trade ban for foreigners), according to United Russia members, are “an ordinary drunken brawl, inflated into an interethnic conflict.”
The chairman of the Moscow City Duma Commission on Interethnic and Interfaith Relations, Igor Eleferenko, called the mention in operational reports and the media of information about the racial, religious and national affiliation of participants in crimes “pedaling” xenophobic sentiments in society. And the “constitutional-legal” impact, as United Russia called their initiatives, will, in their opinion, make it possible to cool the public.
“We don’t ban nationality as such,” Mr. Platonov was indignant in response to the protest attacks of communists from the Moscow City Duma. Indicating nationality, according to him, should become an exclusively personal matter for everyone, since it will still remain a person’s self-identification, associated with the awareness of belonging to a particular nation and pride in this fact.
This time the Moscow faction of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation turned out to be the only opponent of the majority party. The United Democrats, who usually act in opposition to United Russia, guided, in the words of their leader Sergei Mitrokhin, solely by the “usefulness of resolving legislative conflicts,” supported the idea. The communists insisted that United Russia was trying to “hush up” a real problem in society.
“In fact, in Kondopoga there were interethnic problems, on the basis of which the conflict arose,” said the head of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation faction Vladimir Ulas. “And you shouldn’t turn a blind eye to this.” In his opinion, public ignorance about the statistics of crimes on ethnic grounds, which will disappear along with the mention of nationality, can become a slow-motion mechanism for conflicts of even greater intensity.
Communists are confident that, despite the efforts of city authorities to retouch Moscow reality, de facto, compact settlements of people of the same nationality already exist in the capital, which can turn into a ghetto. And United Russia's proposal can protect the interests of ethnic criminal groups.
However, United Russia deputies are confident that their initiatives will not cause damage to the fight against crime, since law enforcement agencies will still be aware of what nationality people are and for what reasons they commit certain offenses.