The case of Irek Murtazin was brought to court

On June 11, 2009, an indictment was drawn up in the case of the former press secretary of the President of Tatarstan, Mintimer Shaimiev, Irek Murtazin. The case was transferred to the Kirovsky District Court of Kazan.

He is charged under part 2 of article 129 (slander), part 1 of article 137 (violation of privacy), paragraph "a" part 2, article 282 (inciting social hatred with the threat of violence, using the media ) of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation.

As stated in the indictment, “By forming among the population of the Republic of Tatarstan a general negative attitude towards the representatives of the authorities of the republic in the form of an enemy and by contributing to inciting social discord, I.M.Murtazin convinces the population of the need for violent active defensive behavior according to the attitude to the authorities of the republic in order to protect their own social status, i.e. calls on them to take violent actions against the authorities of the Republic of Tatarstan" .

As we already wrote, the persecution of Murtazin under an extremist article is unlawful, in our opinion, because we do not consider acceptable either the practice of equating professional groups with social ones, or the actual criminalization of social antagonism, inevitable in modern society.

Moreover, having carefully studied the text of the indictment, we did not find anything in it that - even if we consider the authorities of Tatarstan as a separate social group - would convincingly show the presence of violations of Article 282 in Murtazin's texts.

In fact, the conclusion states the fact that Murtazin, in his book about Shaimiev and other texts, opposed the government of Tatarstan to the people and criticized the government in general and its individual representatives. The examples of "extremist" phrases given in the conclusion are fragments that are incomprehensible without context and have nothing to do with extremism. Those phrases that have a finished look also do not contain signs of Article 282. Moreover, none of the above examples contains calls for violence.

Sources

• presidential litigation // 116.ru. 2009. June 22.
• The indictment in the case of Murtazina AND.M. // Net/Lawyer. 2009.