Speech by a representative of the SOVA Center at the session “Tolerance and Non-Discrimination II” at the annual OSCE Human Dimension Meeting

The Information and Analytical Center "SOVA" took part in the annual OSCE conference on the human dimension in Warsaw. Galina Kozhevnikova, deputy director of the Center, spoke at the plenary session of the session "Tolerance and non-discrimination II" on October 6, 2008.

Speech by G. Kozhevnikova

Dear Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen!

I would like to draw attention to the problems associated with combating racism and discrimination in Russia, where the number of hate crimes has been steadily increasing over the past few years.

First, Russia has an extremely broad legal framework that describes "extremism", which includes actions of the most varied level of public danger - from terrorist acts and racist murders to an indefinite "incitement of social discord." This framework interferes with proper law enforcement aimed at prosecuting real hate crimes - both violence and racist propaganda. Often, anti-extremist legislation is used to restrict fundamental freedoms (expression, assembly, etc.). But the focus of the existing law enforcement is also shifting towards the prosecution of less significant crimes - for example, people are convicted for single statements on Internet forums, while ultra-right publications and Internet portals continue to exist unhindered, much more influential than a lone xenophobe.

Secondly, the uncertainty of the legal framework, combined with a broad political anti-extremist campaign, often becomes an obstacle to discussing the problems of xenophobia and discrimination in the media. Thus, in August, Novaya Gazeta in Petersburg received a warning for extremism for an article expressing indignation at the intention of the far-right organization Movement Against Illegal Immigration to conduct raids to identify Georgian citizens living in Russia. At the same time, the actions of the Movement itself did not attract the attention of law enforcement agencies. A year earlier, the Izvestia newspaper received a similar warning for publishing an article about discriminatory practices in the Republic of Yakutia. Note that such a warning is a serious sanction that may lead to the closure of the publication.

Thirdly, the collection and publication of data on hate crimes is unsatisfactory. The broad legal framework makes it possible to incorrectly operate with statistical data, arbitrarily including or excluding certain types of crimes from the statistics, combining or, conversely, merging indicators for crimes of a violent and non-violent nature (the most famous anti-racist article of the Russian Criminal Code is used to prosecute both violence and propaganda, and in statistics these crimes are not separated in any way).

There is no system for fixing the suspicion of a hate motive when registering violent crimes.

Existing official statistics are not available in the public space. Only from time to time certain fragments of statistics appear in the speeches of officials.

The consequence of the unsatisfactory quality of statistics and their absence in the public space is that these data are not a tool for a meaningful discussion on the issue of xenophobia, racist crimes and discrimination.

For this reason, we recommend

OSCE:

Continue discussions with participating countries on the current practice of collecting statistics related to manifestations of racism and discrimination.

To OSCE participating States:

To focus legislation on combating racism as much as possible on the most dangerous, that is, violent, crimes.
Regularly publish statistics related to crimes based on race, ethnicity, religion, etc. hate, preferably broken down by categories of hate motive. Separate these data from statistics on crimes, which, due to the specifics of national legislation, are considered under the same articles of criminal law.

Sources

Information-analytical center "SOVA". Presentation at working session 5 - "Tolerance and non-discrimination II" // Official website of the OSCE conference. 2008. October 6 (in Russian).
The same (in English). //