Fans as a social group?

On March 10, 2009, the fans of the hockey club SKA (St. Petersburg) sent an open letter to the Kontinental Hockey League with a request to ensure an investigation of an insulting episode for them in several matches of their team with the Spartak team (Moscow) and, among other things, to seek qualification of actions fans of "Spartak" for hours. 1 Art. 282 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (incitement of social discord).

We are talking about insulting chants and songs for the SKA team, shouted out during the matches of the one-eighth final of the Gagarin Cup by Moscow fans.

We do not enter into the essence of the rest of the claims of the St. Petersburg fans, apparently justified, but we cannot but note that no matter how insulting the words of some fans against others, Article 282 of the Criminal Code is not applicable here, since fans of a particular club, from any reasonable point of view are not a social group.

In Russia, there are no legal definitions of the term "social group" and no generally accepted understanding of it (not to mention the inevitable disagreements among experts). Therefore, they try to use this concept again and again to protect the interests of arbitrary groups of citizens, as was already the case in the cases of Savva Terentyev and Vitaly Tanakov .

Sources

• An open letter from fans of HC SKA St. Petersburg // Official forum of the hockey club SKA. 2009. March 10.
• SKA fans ask the KHL to deal with Spartak fans // Infoks.ru. 2009. March 10.