Illegal application of anti-extremist legislation in Russia in 2011

SUMMARY
STANDARD-MAKING - POSITIVE SHIFTS
MAIN TRENDS 2011 : "Over-vigilance" : Internet and anti-extremism : Random victims of wrongful anti-extremism : "E" centers
MAIN AREAS OF PERSECUTION : Religious groups : Political and civil activists : Media stories
SOME STATISTICS

SUMMARY During the surge of the protest movement in the winter of 2011-2012, the issue of political repression became one of the most discussed, and along with it, anti-extremist legislation in general and Art. 282 of the Criminal Code in particular. But if earlier the opponents of these laws were primarily the most uncompromising defenders of freedom of speech, then during 2011 the voice of the ultra-right became much more audible, unanimously putting forward the same demands with the obvious goal of protecting their like-minded people, who were convicted not only for incitement of various kinds, but also for violent hate crimes. Vladimir Zhirinovsky even introduced bills to repeal the law "On countering extremist activity" and Art. 282 of the Criminal Code, and the obvious lack of elaboration of these bills betrayed their task - not to change the legislation, but to make a certain political gesture. The young ultranationalists themselves expressed themselves in their "chants" more lapidarily, for example: "To Russians - Russian Moscow, cancel two-eight-two."

If the goals of the ultranationalists are clear and a meaningful discussion of laws and law enforcement is not in their interests, then the non-radical part of the opposition and civil activists could treat all this issue more carefully. Unfortunately, protests against “illegal anti-extremism” are worded extremely casually, often protesters do not even distinguish between different articles of the Criminal Code (for example, 280, 282 and 282 ² ). In order to achieve improved legislation and an end to abuses, a thorough review of this legislation and enforcement based on clear and non-politicized criteria is needed.

Anti-extremist legislation has already been subjected to detailed criticism more than once [1] , so the purpose of this report is to analyze the main trends in law enforcement in 2011. The report is divided into four parts. The first provides an overview of legal innovations. The second one analyzes those tendencies that were the most typical for the past year. The third gives a traditional overview of the main categories of objects of application of "illegal anti-extremism". The fourth part, new to our reports, is an attempt at a statistical generalization of repressive practices in this area.

In general, we consider two levels of violations to be “illegal anti-extremism”. The first is the restriction of fundamental rights and freedoms to a degree significantly exceeding that prescribed by international law. The second is the abuse of even the current, and so quite repressive, legislation [2] .

As in all previous years, the most serious persecution concerned certain religious groups, but certain categories of political and civil activists also became targets of "illegal anti-extremism." To a lesser extent, the media suffered from it last year, but illegal law enforcement regarding the Internet has become wider.

In general, we see that countering extremism, in the form in which it has developed under the influence of repressive legislation and repressive campaigns, generates more and more “side effects”. Anti-extremist legislation was originally seen as a kind of "tolerance enforcement" and is being interpreted more and more arbitrary in this regard, creating the threat of persecution for controversial statements that are less and less dangerous to society. Increasing pressure is being placed on organizations that accidentally find themselves in the path of "fighters against extremism", such as libraries or Internet service providers. The number of clearly side, random, in fact, victims of this struggle is growing. Finally, more and more often we record abuses by specialized anti-extremist units.

The solution to all these problems requires a radical reform of all anti-extremist legislation. Certain aspects of this reform can and should be the subject of serious discussion, which does not fit into the format of this report. Here are just a few of the key points:

• redefining the object of counteraction as a set of criminal acts directly or indirectly related to ideologically motivated violence;

• decriminalization of all other acts now classified as extremist;

• rejection of legal mechanisms that have clearly discredited themselves, primarily the prohibition of information materials and the mandatory examination in “extremist” cases;

• revision of earlier court decisions to ban organizations as extremist, as well as criminal sentences, at least under Art. 280 and 282 of the Criminal Code, since the composition of the articles will be changed in the direction of narrowing during the reform.

STANDARD-MAKING - POSITIVE SHIFTS The main developments in the field of rulemaking in 2011 were positive. One gets the impression that the political leadership, the leadership of law enforcement agencies (always involved in lawmaking in this area), and especially the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, have a need to eliminate at least the most obvious inconsistencies and abuses that arise in the field of “anti-extremism”. Of course, things have not yet reached full-scale reforms, which was expressed, in particular, in the fact that the Presidential Administration rejected the draft reform of anti-extremist legislation presented by the Human Rights Council [3] . However, partial reforms are important not only in their own right, but also as the beginning of a process: previously, the authorities only ignored the issue of “illegal anti-extremism.”

The main events in this area have already been described in the SOVA Center's report on combating xenophobia and ultranationalism [4] , here we will only quote large quotations from this report regarding the main changes and initiatives.

“The most significant event of 2011 was not a law or a draft law, but the Decree of the Plenum of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation No. 11 “On judicial practice in criminal cases on crimes of an extremist orientation” dated June 28, 2011 [5], which we repeatedly refer to in this report.

The court spoke on a number of contentious issues of distinguishing between different qualifications of acts that can be recognized as extremist.

Firstly, it is confirmed that the mass distribution of prohibited materials can be considered a criminal offense under Art. 282 of the Criminal Code, if the direct intent to incite hatred is proven.

Secondly, the court recognized the correct application of Art. 282 of the Criminal Code to violent crimes if they are aimed at inciting hatred among third parties, for example, through a public and demonstrative ideologically motivated attack. Acts of vandalism of various kinds, if this results in a public message, for example, leaving an inscription that incites hatred, must be qualified according to the totality of the relevant articles (i.e., art. art. 214 and 244) and art. 282.

Thirdly, the court indicated that in order to find a person guilty of participating in an extremist community (Article 282 ¹ of the Criminal Code), it is enough that he at least in some form participate in its activities, without even committing other crimes.

The resolution contains a number of fundamentally important points that have been raised by experts and human rights activists for more than a year, which are important primarily for the elimination of illegal law enforcement.

Firstly, the court pointed out that criticism of officials and politicians should not be qualified under Art. 282, since they cannot be equated with ordinary citizens in this matter.

Secondly (and this is even more important in the context of the application of Article 282), criticism of political, religious and ideological associations and beliefs, as well as national and religious customs, is not in itself incitement to hatred.

Thirdly, the court forbade during the examinations to ask experts (linguists, psychologists, etc.) legal questions related to the assessment of the committed act. For example, an expert should not be asked whether the materials being studied are aimed at inciting national hatred. However, by doing so, the Supreme Court only recalled the basics of criminal procedural law: legal issues are entirely within the competence of the investigation and the court.

However, the Decree did not eliminate all the blank spots in the anti-extremist legislation. In particular, it has not been said which groups are covered by the anti-extremist legislation in terms of the motive of hatred towards a social group. The essence of Art. 282 ² Criminal Code (“Organization of the activities of an extremist organization”): for example, can it be considered a continuation of the activities of a banned organization that is carried out under a changed name and symbols, but by the same persons and the same in essence.

Finally, experience has shown that courts should not be expected to quickly accept unfamiliar Supreme Court clarifications. Although we see that in some cases the verdicts are already passed taking into account these clarifications.

On July 26, a presidential bill came into force, providing for the expansion of the use of "prohibitions on the profession" in certain "extremist" articles of the Criminal Code.

Art. Art. 280 (“Public calls for extremist activities”), 282 ¹ RF (“Organization of an extremist community”) and 282 ² (“Organization of the activities of an extremist organization”). In some cases, a punishment not previously applied in these articles was introduced in the form of deprivation of the right to hold certain positions or engage in certain activities, and where it was originally intended, the terms of this type of punishment were increased.

We support the tightening in this case of the “ban on the profession” [6] , as well as the fact that the terms of punishment in the form of imprisonment were not changed upwards - we do not believe that “words” should be punished with prison terms.

On December 7, 2011, a presidential bill came into force, providing for a large-scale humanization of the Criminal Code, also concerning "extremist crimes." According to the bill, for crimes under Part 1 of Art. 280, part 1 of Art. 282, part 2 of Art. 282 ¹ and parts 1 and 2 of Art. 282 ² Criminal Code, sentences in the form of deprivation of liberty will be issued much less frequently, since these crimes will be considered crimes of minor gravity, and deprivation of liberty will not be applied to such crimes in the absence of aggravating circumstances. We approve of this initiative, since it concerns sentences that are handed down only "for words" or only for the fact of membership in some group.

The amendments will indirectly affect the practice of imposing a suspended sentence for such crimes: the court, as a rule, assigns suspended sentences to imprisonment, and since such sentences become rare, then there will be fewer suspended sentences. We welcome such changes, as we believe that conditional punishment is, in fact, the absence of punishment for an ideologically motivated criminal.

In addition, two more anti-extremist bills were put forward in 2011, which raise serious doubts.

On August 4, the Government submitted to the State Duma a draft law that deals with the financing of extremist activities and propaganda of extremism on the Internet. It provides:

• introduction of a new article of the Criminal Code - 282 ³ (“Financing of extremist activity”), the punishment for which varies from a fine to 6 years in prison;

• inclusion in the list of confiscated property of valuables intended to finance extremist activities;

• equating the Internet with the media in relation to Art. 280 and 282 of the Criminal Code;

• establishment of procedural deadlines related to the recognition of materials as extremist: the court decision must be sent to the Ministry of Justice within three days, and the Ministry of Justice must enter this decision into the Federal List within 30 days.

We are not sure that the introduction of an article on the financing of extremist activities makes sense, since the Criminal Code already assumes that the provision of funds for the commission of a crime is one of the forms of complicity (Article 33 of the Criminal Code). However, there will be no harm from adding such an article either.

As for equating the Internet with the media, this initiative seems to us extremely unsuccessful. Firstly, not every material posted on the Internet is public: it can be hidden with a password and available only to a narrow circle of users - such placement is no different from direct mailing. Secondly, in any propaganda crimes, the degree of publicity is critical. If in relation to the media it is quite obvious, then for speeches on the Internet this parameter can vary greatly - from much more than for many newspapers to less than when talking in a crowded room.

The proposed bill encourages serious persecution (especially under Article 280) of statements on the Internet, the public danger of which is simply negligible due to the small real audience. The fact is that the amendment essentially does not change anything in the disposition of Art. 282: the Internet, like the media, is mentioned after the words "including". But in Art. 280 The use of the media (and, according to the project, the Internet) is a qualifying feature, so that any call for extremist activity on the Internet should be punished under this article only by imprisonment, and for up to five years. The motivation for such a harsh innovation is not clear. After all, even now nothing prevents prosecution for unlawful statements posted on the Internet, and considerable practice has already accumulated in relevant cases, both lawful (see below) and unlawful.

The bill, however, is not moving forward in the Duma. And, judging by the growing resistance, it may remain unaccepted in its current form.

On October 11, 2011, President Dmitry Medvedev submitted to the State Duma a draft Federal Law “On Amendments to Article 22.1 of the Federal Law “On State Registration of Legal Entities and Individual Entrepreneurs” and Articles 331 and 351.1 of the Labor Code of the Russian Federation.”

The bill concerns restrictions on working with minors. Now those who have been convicted or even involved (but not acquitted) under a good half of the articles of the Criminal Code are not allowed to it. It is proposed to add crimes against the foundations of the constitutional order to this list (Chapter 29 of the Criminal Code). These include the crimes provided for by Art. 280, 282, 282 ¹ and 282 ² UK.

We have no complaints about the law itself, but we want to emphasize that a significant number of unlawful sentences are passed under these articles of the Criminal Code. This means that victims of the misuse of anti-extremist legislation will face even more disempowerment if this law is passed.”

As you can see, not all the changes of the past year were for the better. In particular, the situation in the field of Internet regulation has only worsened (see below in the chapter “Internet and anti-extremism”). Let us dwell, however, on one more encouraging episode, which demonstrates that not only the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation is concerned about at least the most obvious excesses of anti-extremist law enforcement.

We have already written more than once that Russian legislation provides for an absolute ban on the public use of Nazi and similar symbols. Such a context-independent prohibition is obviously absurd and certainly not systematically enforced. And finally, another case of senseless repression attracted the attention of not only human rights activists and the media.

Vadim Gromyko, the son of the vice-governor of the Krasnodar Territory Yevgeny Gromyko, decided to shoot a comic video with himself in the role of Stirlitz, for which he used a rented SS uniform. As a result, the regional prosecutor's office opened a case under Art. 20.3 of the Code of Administrative Offenses on propaganda and demonstration of Nazi symbols against a woman who posted a photo of V. Gromyko in this form, demanded that these photos be removed from all media that talked about the video (which caused a scandal in the region); Claims were also made against the police, the rector of the university where V. Gromyko studies, and the director of the cultural center where he rented a uniform.

The ridiculous story could have been forgotten, like many similar ones before it, but the Living Kuban portal considered the claims of the prosecutor's office unfounded, since the material on the site was by no means aimed at promoting Nazism, and went to court.

In essence, the editors, of course, were right, but according to the letter of the law, they were not. An unconditional ban is contained in the old law "On perpetuating the victory of the Soviet people in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945", and the later law "On countering extremist activity" prohibits "propaganda and demonstration", and it is not entirely clear how to understand the union "and" in this prohibition: according to the logic of Russian grammar, both are prohibited separately, and according to the tradition of word usage in legislation, the union “either”, and not “and”, is used to denote the prohibition of both. Thus, the norm of the law “On perpetuating…” can hardly be considered repealed.

In September, the head of Roskomnadzor, Sergei Sitnikov, delved into the situation of the Living Kuban and announced that his department would apply to the regional prosecutor's office with a request to withdraw the requirement for publication, and most importantly, initiate a process of discussing the revision of the relevant norms of the law. On October 5, 2011, the Public Council under Roskomnadzor supported Sitnikov's position, according to which the media editors should not be held responsible for publishing images of Nazi symbols or paraphernalia, or symbols or paraphernalia similar to Nazi ones, if the editorial office did not pursue the goal of promoting Nazi ideas.

It is difficult to say when it will be possible to achieve a change in legislation, but at least the position of Roskomnadzor on the issue of symbols has changed radically.

The legal climate in Russia is significantly influenced by the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights. Of course, Russia is not very willing to implement the recommendations of the ECHR, although it is obliged to do so as a member of the Council of Europe, but nevertheless, these recommendations in many cases do not go unnoticed.

On June 21, 2011, the ECHR ruled that the creation by Russian law enforcement agencies of the Surveillance Control database, which, as part of the fight against extremism, monitors various activists, as well as their “preventive” detentions, violates the right to respect for private life. The decision was made following a complaint from Nizhny Novgorod human rights activist Sergei Shimovolos.

As we already wrote, the very existence of a database of people in the police, in respect of which operational work should be carried out, is completely natural. The ECtHR does not argue with this either. The Court also has no doubt that any secret surveillance interferes with a person's private life, and the only question is the grounds and rules for such interference. The Strasbourg Court insists that the grounds on which a person may be included in the database for secret surveillance must be clearly set out in a publicly available legal act, so that a citizen has the opportunity to avoid such surveillance. Since the Surveillance Control operates on the basis of an unpublished order, and the legislation does not clearly explain the grounds for including people in this database (in particular, since the very definition of extremist activity is too vague) and does not describe the appeal procedure, the existing mechanism in Russia does not comply the notion of "statutory" measures affecting a person's private life [7] .

Already in February 2012, the Nizhny Novgorod District Court of Nizhny Novgorod was forced to resume consideration of the complaint of S. Shimovolos. For the full implementation of the decision of the ECtHR, it is necessary to clarify the definition of extremist activity and issue a public and corresponding to European criteria act on the functioning of the "Surveillance Control".

MAIN TRENDS IN 2011 The SOVA Center has been monitoring abuses in the application of anti-extremist legislation for several years, and has issued several annual reports on this topic [8] . Over the years, law enforcement has already acquired some routine features; accordingly, many abuses have become routine. Of course, we are obliged to analyze this routine as well, and the next section of the report is devoted to this. But in this section, we want to focus on what was specific to 2011.

"Over-vigilance" Anti-extremist legislation is directed primarily against behavior motivated by this or that intolerance, cultivating, promoting and implementing it in practice (including in the form of serious crimes against a person). We, like the legislator and the majority of citizens, agree that intolerance is bad both ethically and socially, or if not bad in itself, can lead to bad consequences. This is true even for such a form of intolerance as morally justified indignation at someone's harmful and dangerous actions. Therefore, when discussing the legitimacy of anti-extremist law enforcement, we must keep in mind that socially dangerous behavior, to which law enforcement agencies cannot but respond, may well be associated with worldview attitudes that are by no means reprehensible in themselves - for example, these may be certain religious or political views.

But we also have no doubt that in many cases society should not force citizens to behave tolerantly, and even more so, the state cannot be trusted in all cases: the moral and other self-regulation of society can only in extreme cases be replaced by state intervention. This remains true even in situations where the worldviews of some citizens do not please the majority of others (examples of religious and political views are easy to imagine). This is true even if some other bearers of the same attitudes committed crimes because of them: after all, everyone is responsible only for their actions (bracketing the roles of a leader, parent, etc.) and statements. This last consideration must be kept in mind when we talk about the public statements of people who share extremely xenophobic views of one kind or another.

However, all these considerations were clearly not taken into account when developing anti-extremist legislation, and, worse, are not taken into account when applying it, although a lot of experience has already been accumulated that encourages reflection.

Many cases are known when certain anti-extremist measures were taken in cases where the statement (in the form of a speech, article, film, etc.) was undeniably intolerant towards a particular group (most often ethnic), but did not contain any inflammatory appeals. It is especially outrageous when criminal cases are initiated in such cases: law enforcement agencies clearly ignore or misinterpret such a necessary element of any crime as its public danger [9] .

The greatest problems are caused by such an element of the definition of "extremist activity" as the assertion of the inferiority or superiority of some group, and the related part of the disposition of Art. 282 of the Criminal Code, dedicated to the humiliation of the dignity of people depending on belonging to a group. It can be assumed that such statements do not pose a significant public danger, since in essence they are similar to such acts as libel or insult, decriminalized in December 2011. It seems to us that an adequate solution to the problem would be the removal of the element “humiliation” from Art. 282 of the Criminal Code.

But while “humiliation” appears in a number of cases, and we believe that this, if it corresponds to the letter of the law, does not correspond to the spirit of today's Russian criminal law, and even more so to the limits of freedom of speech that are established by the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental freedoms as it is understood in the case law of the European Court of Human Rights.

For example, at the very end of December, the prosecutor’s office of Kabardino-Balkaria filed a lawsuit to ban the extremist article “Balkaria for the Balkars ... and Moscow for them, dear ones,” which contains only hints of the backwardness of the Balkar people and hostility towards Kabardins widespread in it. and Russian (and immediately after the New Year, a criminal case was initiated under Article 282 of the Criminal Code).

In April 2011, a new case was initiated against Yuri Mukhin, leader of the banned Army of the Will of the People and editor-in-chief of the banned newspaper Duel (since then, the newspaper K Barrier, which replaced Duel, has been closed down and replaced by the newspaper "In Their Own Names"). This time, the anti-Semite Mukhin is accused of anti-Semitism under Art. 282 of the Criminal Code is clearly illegal: the article “I also have advice” is hostile towards the Jews, but the worst thing they are accused of in the article is that they first created and then destroyed the USSR. Mukhin is also charged with quoting Hitler, which in itself cannot be considered a crime.

A more famous example is the initiation of a criminal case under the same article against the well-known nationalist activist Konstantin Krylov for his speech at the “Stop feeding the Caucasus!” rally. This speech contained hints that representatives of the Caucasian peoples were killing Russians and corrupting the police, but there were no illegal calls at all.

But if in these cases it can still be expected that the cases will not reach the court or the accused will be acquitted (and contrary to popular belief, both things happen with charges under Article 282 of the Criminal Code), then the Kaliningrad publisher Boris Obraztsov was already convicted on September 19 2011 under Part 1 of Art. 282 of the Criminal Code to pay a fine of 110 thousand rubles for printed attacks on the Russian Orthodox Church. Obraztsov also spoke about religious people in general, but even the harshest statement in the article - " Religion is a combination of suckers who are bred and scum who are at the head of any religious organization" - is clearly not so aggressive as to resort to to criminal prosecution.

In our opinion, at least three circumstances must be taken into account here. Firstly, there were no appeals at all in the article, and the humiliation of the dignity of citizens in itself is a weak and rather dubious element in the criminal law, especially now that such acts as insult and slander were decriminalized in December 2011. Secondly, the position of the Supreme Court was not properly taken into account, which in the June Resolution stated that “ criticism of ... religious associations, ... religious beliefs, ... or religious practices in itself should not be considered as an act aimed at inciting hatred or enmity ,” although the Supreme Court does not speak of humiliation here. Thirdly, in general, the criterion of public danger of an act, which is critical for recognizing it as criminal in accordance with Part 2 of Art. 14 of the Criminal Code: Obraztsov's speech, which is very typical of ordinary anti-church rhetoric, hardly really offended many.

But the matter did not end there. In mid-November, someone duplicated Obraztsov's text on the Internet (in fact, many then partially duplicated it), and this became the basis for instituting a second criminal case - already on the fact of re-publication. So far, however, it is not clear how the prosecution will prove that it was Obraztsov who carried it out. On December 5, searches were carried out at his place, and on December 13, the Presidium of the Kaliningrad Regional Court, as part of supervision, ordered the court of the Leningradsky District of Kaliningrad to consider the prosecutor's application to recognize the ill-fated text as extremist [10] . Here, by the way, an interesting procedural dispute emerged: previously, the district and regional courts did not want to do this, since they considered it wrong to consider the administrative case on the text in parallel with the criminal case on it. But the Presidium of the Regional Court decided otherwise.

We have already been forced to repeat more than once that the assertion of the superiority and exclusivity of religious beliefs cannot in any way be the basis for prosecution, both criminal and administrative. Although our laws, alas, can be understood in such a way that such statements are criminal, even elementary common sense suggests that the assertion of the exclusivity of one’s own faith (one’s own religion or one’s interpretation of religion) is a natural and almost universal feature of religiosity as such. Of course, crimes can be committed on the basis of what is usually called "fanatical faith", but this is no reason to prohibit manifestations of such faith, non-criminal in some other sense.

2011 brought new persecution based solely on these shaky grounds (see the next section of the report for examples). Of course, such persecution is extremely selective, since truly systematic persecution for asserting religious exclusivity is simply impossible.

The assertion of the exclusivity of political views is already becoming a basis for persecution, although this contradicts anti-extremist legislation even in its current form. Political and ideological enmity is, according to the Criminal Code, an aggravating circumstance for any crime, along with racial, religious, etc. enmity. But Art. 282 of the Criminal Code, which criminalizes public statements aimed at inciting all sorts of hostility, excludes such types of it as political and ideological. Simply put, inciting hostility between political and ideological opponents is not a crime. However, such an exception in "enforcing tolerance" seems to be unjustified by some, and a way around this exception has been found.

On June 24, 2011, the prosecutor's office of the Republic of Tatarstan issued a warning about the inadmissibility of carrying out extremist activities to the user of the VKontakte network, Roman Ilyin, the administrator of the Autonomous Action (Kazan) group. According to the prosecutor's office, the content of the manifesto of libertarian communism, to which Autonomous Action is committed, "determines" social enmity between groups of supporters and non-supporters of this movement. Thus, the prosecutor's office is actually preparing to qualify the actions of the Kazan "autonomous" as inciting hostility towards the "social group" of their political opponents. In addition to another obvious abuse of the concept of "social group", we see here an attempt to criminalize the expression of political views (albeit in this case undoubtedly radical ones) as such.

Internet and anti-extremism There is no doubt that everything that is prohibited offline is also prohibited online. And there is already a very significant body of anti-extremist law enforcement based on statements made on the Internet. This law enforcement has its successes (rather quantitative) and serious problems, which we have written about more than once, but which do not disappear, but, on the contrary, appear more and more often. This is not counting the actual cases where this or that material on the Internet is prohibited in essence unlawfully.

First, the prosecution and the court are completely unaccustomed to taking into account the degree of publicity of an utterance as an important criterion for its public danger. And this is not taken into account at all in relation to the Internet, where the degree of publicity is really not so easy to assess [11] .

Secondly, the problem of removing materials from the network remains. Removing materials simply at the request of law enforcement is a matter of voluntary choice, since such requests are not binding. But it's not uncommon for site owners or hosting providers to agree that certain material should be removed because it likely violates the law and their own policies (and responsible hosting providers usually have their own reasonable limits on what they post). Problems begin if the material is not voluntarily removed.

There are two legitimate mechanisms for securing decisions to ban material in relation to the Internet. The first is a targeted court decision to delete, which is mandatory for domestic hosters and site owners (social network accounts, etc.), but it is rarely resorted to, since for this it is actually necessary to make two decisions: to recognize the material as extremist and to take decision on its specific placement. The second mechanism is a court decision to block access to prohibited material, addressed to one or more access providers.

Often, a court decision in both mechanisms is replaced by a simple demand from law enforcement agencies, which, we believe, is not enough, since here, as a rule, there is a disagreement that should be resolved in court. The fact is that the law "On Communications" prescribes the fulfillment of "motivated requirements" of law enforcement agencies, but in relation to "extremist content" there is still no generally accepted understanding of how this motivation should look like.

Meanwhile, a new overtone was introduced by the new law “On Police”, which came into force on March 1, 2011. Unlike the previous law "On the Police", this law states that the submissions of the police " on the elimination of the causes and conditions that contribute to the implementation of threats to the security of citizens and public safety, the commission of crimes and administrative offenses " are mandatory. Until now, this short story has not shown itself in any way in the field of anti-extremism, but, undoubtedly, it will still show itself.

In 2011, there were many cases of both judicial and extrajudicial blocking of sites, as a rule, due to the presence of literally one or two previously banned materials on them (although often the specific reasons for blocking are not published). It is doubtful that in all these cases, law enforcement agencies first asked the owners of the site or the hosting provider to remove these materials themselves. The blocking method, which is increasingly used, is also fraught with problems, which we have already written about [12] .

ISPs have repeatedly tried to insist that they cannot be held responsible for the content their customers read, watch and listen to, and moreover, attempting to influence this would be a breach of contract or even an attempt at censorship. If the dispute went to court, the providers lost more often than they won. As a rule, it was about blocking access to individual websites of Jehovah's Witnesses or National Bolsheviks, websites with prohibited Muslim or nationalist materials. But sometimes the demands for blocking were more massive: in Tolyatti, the prosecutor's office demanded that a number of local providers block access to 100 sites at once, and the court approved this requirement for 80 of them.

The greatest damage is caused by such a clearly disproportionate decision as the blocking of an entire site due to individual materials on it. At the very least, the disproportion and unfairness of such a decision is obvious in cases where certain materials prohibited by the court are clearly atypical for this site. The most striking example was the absurd decision made in the Khabarovsk Territory to ban YouTube and several other world-famous services only because of certain materials, but it was canceled. On the other hand, the no less ridiculous decision of one of the courts of the city of Ulyanovsk to ban the liveinternet.ru service, popular in Russia, and the popular Tatar portal tatarlar.ru, was not canceled and came into force.

The obviously repressive bias that interim anti-extremist measures on the Internet have taken on is revealingly manifested in the case of the ban on national-Bolshevik websites in Khabarovsk. Most importantly, this case set an important precedent.

In the case of blocking access to the websites of the National Bolsheviks, which was initiated at the request of the prosecutor's office of Khabarovsk back in 2009, the Central District Court of Khabarovsk on February 2, 2010, and after it the regional court on April 28, 2010, took the side of the provider, since the prosecutor's office did not have clear legal grounds to require blocking of the site. Indeed, the NBP party was banned, but not its websites, and it does not follow from any law that one implies the other (and in practice it is believed that the materials of a banned organization should be banned by a separate court decision). In addition, the Khabarovsk courts then decided that the access provider was not involved in the distribution of materials.

But the General Prosecutor's Office appealed these decisions to the Supreme Court, and the Judicial Collegium of the Supreme Court for Civil Cases returned the case for reconsideration, and along the way adopted Determination No. 58-Vpr11-2 [ 13] on May 10, 2011 , which has a more general meaning.

The Supreme Court states in this Ruling that by providing access to prohibited information, the provider turns into its distributor - only because it has the technical ability to block. Moreover, the Supreme Court decided that the blocking should be carried out without a court decision, only at the motivated request of law enforcement agencies, and did not explain what kind of motivation is sufficient here (namely, this issue is controversial).

Thus, now, unfortunately, just such a solution to the dispute on blocking is in effect. Apparently, it will continue to operate until the issue is somehow otherwise resolved at the legislative level. (In the Khabarovsk Territory itself, after the decision of the Supreme Court, the blocking of access is carried out almost without resistance.)

The topic of blocking access as an interim measure for the prohibition of materials is related to the topic of blocking sites as an independent measure.

In some cases, the court approved the requirement to block access to the site on the basis that the site belongs to a prohibited organization. In June, the Sovetsky District Court of the city of Rostov-on-Don ordered a number of local Internet providers to block access to sites “which are used in their activities by the leader of the banned interregional public movement “Army of the People’s Will”” , and the courts in Kirov and Astrakhan - to the sites of the National Bolsheviks . In November-December, several reports appeared at once about blocking access to websites of Jehovah's Witnesses in different cities, and it is not always clear whether there was a court decision, or whether the instructions of law enforcement agencies were enough for providers, and which ones. On May 18, the Krasnoflotsky District Court of Khabarovsk approved a demand to block access to the websites of the National Bolsheviks, Jehovah's Witnesses, and the Slavic Union (SS), apparently because they are associated with organizations banned as extremist. The degree of justification and legitimacy of the bans of these organizations themselves can be very different - from the obviously illegally banned two regional organizations of Jehovah's Witnesses to the legally and quite appropriately banned neo-Nazi SS, but the blocking of entire sites without additional court decisions on their ban cannot be considered legitimate. It is noteworthy that the site nbp-info.ru was still banned in Kirov as extremist, but not before the decision to block access to it, but a month later (the rest remain not banned).

In a number of cases, the prosecutor's office successfully sought to block sites not because they found prohibited materials there, but because they themselves saw some extremist content on these sites and, on this basis, demanded blocking access to them. Judgments to block access to dozens of sites at once were issued in 2011 in Tolyatti and Khabarovsk. It is difficult to assume that the content of many sites at once was seriously studied in court. In fact, in such cases, the decision to block access replaces, albeit at the local level, a court decision to ban the relevant materials. But - regardless of the justification of such measures from the point of view of public safety and other considerations - it should be recognized that the law "On countering extremist activity" does not provide for blocking without a ban. However, de facto, this new prohibitive mechanism is being formed and applied more and more widely. Something like the Great Wall of China is still far away, but law enforcement agencies are spontaneously moving in this direction.

Thirdly, organizations that simply have nothing to do with extremist materials and practically cannot help reduce the real danger associated with some of these materials also have problems with “extremist materials” on the Internet. We are talking about organizations that provide citizens with access to the Internet - about thousands of schools and libraries, and many other similar places. According to the logic of anti-extremist law enforcement, they, like Internet access providers, are charged with the duty to block “extremist content”. But how exactly they should do this is not described in any legislative acts.

In practice, this means that schools and libraries are required to have filters on their computers that prevent users from accessing "extremist material" (as well as pornography, for example). In the event that such user protection does not work or does not work properly, the prosecutor's office issues warnings to the directors and insists on disciplinary liability for those responsible. At one time, Internet filtering software was centrally sent to schools, but schools themselves must take care of updating the filter databases, and neither money nor often personnel is enough for this. Libraries weren't supplied with such filters at all, and, of course, libraries don't have the money to install them themselves.

In addition, the presence of filters does not relieve institutions such as schools from problems with the prosecutor's office. After all, no filters can guarantee that the user will not be able to access the site with some prohibited materials. The usual way of "filtering the Internet for extremism" - blocking access to sites directly listed in the Federal List of Extremist Materials - is obviously insufficient. Checking the operation of the filter is usually done simply by searching for certain keywords - and here the prosecutor immediately gets access to a lot of pages, either really similar to those banned by the court, or simply clearly containing some kind of inflammatory content, which is immediately qualified as “extremist”. It is debatable how much the installation of filters can protect children and especially adults from something, but it turns institutions such as schools and libraries into a convenient victim of “anti-extremist reporting”.

Accordingly, the number of inspections and various acts of prosecutorial response is growing, in many cases with disciplinary consequences for employees. According to our most conservative estimates [14] , 171 sanctions were issued before the beginning of 2011, and 192 in 2011 alone.

Random Victims of Illegal Anti-Extremism As we wrote earlier, more and more often the victims of illegal or simply unreasonable anti-extremist law enforcement are people and organizations that are clearly not “suspected of extremism”, but simply accidentally come to the attention of law enforcement agencies or become a convenient target for the latter [15 ] .

We wrote more than once about the problems of libraries, sandwiched between the law “On librarianship”, which requires not restricting readers' access to funds, and anti-extremist legislation, which requires the exclusion of the mass distribution of prohibited materials, we wrote more than once [16 ] .

One can sum up this anti-library campaign. Prosecutors have filed a variety of claims against libraries, starting with the very fact that they have prohibited materials (usually books) in their collections, although libraries have no legal grounds for removing such materials. The basis for sanctions could be:

• the lack of a printed Federal List or the lack of updating it (which is even technically ridiculous, given the length of this document);

• lack of regular reconciliations of funds with the list, or even simply the absence of a plan for such reconciliations;

• the absence in the regulation of the library of the on-duty phrase about “a ban on the distribution of extremist literature”;

• the absence of a subscription to Rossiyskaya Gazeta, where the list is published (although it is published much more quickly on the website of the Ministry of Justice);

• the absence of restrictions on access to books from the list (although there is no regulation providing for the procedure for such restrictions);

• lack of effective or any filtering of "extremist content" on the Internet (see above about this).

In 2011, the scale of the campaign became noticeably larger. According to our obviously incomplete data, from mid-2008 to the end of 2010, there were at least 170 cases of unlawful sanctions against the management of libraries (including school libraries), and in 2011 alone, at least 138 such cases [17 ] .

Sanctions have become tougher. If earlier the case was limited to warnings and disciplinary measures, now they began to pass sentences under Art. 20.29 of the Code of Administrative Offenses of the Russian Federation for possession for the purpose of mass distribution of extremist materials. In fact, several library directors have been fined for carrying out their official duties.

For example, on July 4, 2011, the world court in Yekaterinburg found Galina Kudryashova, director of the Zonal Scientific Library of the Ural Federal University, guilty. She was sentenced to a fine for the fact that A. Okorokov's book "Fascism and Russian Emigration" and the article "The Chechen Republic" from the "Big Encyclopedia" of the "Terra" publishing house were found in the fund (that is, of course, the entire volume of this encyclopedia). Okorokov's book is a scientific publication (whether good or bad) that cannot be removed from the university scientific library. This applies all the more to a whole volume of the encyclopedia, regardless of how reasonable the injunction against the article "The Chechen Republic" was.

In January, a criminal case was even initiated under Art. 282 of the Criminal Code for the storage in the Moscow Library of Ukrainian Literature of books and leaflets of Ukrainian nationalists, in which, of course, there were anti-Russian and anti-Russian statements. But already in the summer the case was still closed due to the lack of corpus delicti.

It remains to be added that the prosecutor's office, finding fault with libraries, is generally not in the mood for a "war to a victorious end." Back in 2009, at the level of the Ministry of Culture and the General Prosecutor's Office, quite practical and easy procedures for access to extremist materials were developed on the basis of instructions already implemented by the leading libraries in the capital. And although, due to the fault of the Ministry of Justice, the corresponding normative act was not adopted, the existence of a regulated procedure may well protect the library [18] .

For example, on June 2, 2011, the prosecutor's office of the Omsk region filed a lawsuit against the Pushkin Omsk Library. The reason was the refusal of the library to withdraw from the fund and destroy six books recognized as extremist. And already in July, the proceedings on the suit were terminated, as the regional Ministry of Culture developed special regulatory documents for libraries.

Of course, "bystanders" suffer from anti-extremist law enforcement primarily because of the propensity of many law enforcement officers to imitate it.

A vivid example of such imitation in 2011 was the case of the closure of the website of the writer Leonid Kaganov. Kaganov, indignant at the very fact of the ban on texts, cited as an example one already banned anti-Semitic poem. The FSB - more than a year later - turned to the hosting provider, who turned to Kaganov, and he replaced the poem with a parody acrostic of his own composition, the first letters of which formed the words: "What's the problem with the wrong verse." But for some reason, this did not help, and at the request of the FSB, the Zenon hosting provider closed Kaganov's website (the site, of course, simply moved to another domain).

Numerous cases of sanctions for displaying Nazi symbols outside the context of any neo-Nazi or nationalist propaganda in general are an imitation of the fight against extremism [19] . For example, in Omsk, a student was fined for painting the American flag and President Bush Jr. with swastikas as a sign of protest.

The very possibility of punishing the display of a swastika and similar items outside of the appropriate propaganda context is an obvious defect in the legislation, and the relevant norms simply cannot be consistently applied (it is enough to recall films about the Great Patriotic War). However, in practice, the courts sometimes decide the dispute in favor of the accused, as happened with the Lipetsk antiquarian Konstantin Kuzmin, who managed to prove that he traded Nazi Germany awards without putting them on public display.

Finally, two cases of violent crime should be mentioned, which nonetheless merit mention in this section. In both cases, some "extremist motive" was attributed to the defendants, clearly without proper justification. It is difficult even in some reasonable way to explain the attribution of this motif.

Both cases are fairly well-known in their own right. The first is a live fight on NTV on September 16 between major businessmen Alexander Lebedev and Sergei Polonsky. The Investigative Committee opened a case under paragraph "b" part 1 of Art. 213 of the Criminal Code, that is, for hooliganism motivated by hatred. It is impossible to imagine what kind of hatred provided for by the Criminal Code - political, ideological, racial, national and social - can be meant in this case. In December, the court, despite the outlandish qualifications, denied the complaint to initiate proceedings.

Signs of extremism were also found in the well-known gangster attack on a rock festival in Miass in 2010. Then the attackers seriously beat and wounded dozens of people. As a result, in relation to 13 of them, the investigation was completed already in the summer of 2011 (we do not know the fate of the other participants in the raid), and they were charged with death. 1, 2 art. 212 of the Criminal Code (“Organization and participation in mass riots”), and three of them - and paragraphs. "a", "c" part 2 of Art. 282 of the Criminal Code (“Inciting hatred against a social group, committed with the use of violence by an organized group”). In this case, the whole point is in a peculiar understanding of the term "social group". The prosecution believes that the crime was directed against " a social group of an informal type, with such common values ​​and interests as a passion for rock music ." Why did the prosecution need additional qualification of the attack under Art. 282, we do not understand.

Centers "E" The creation of specialized units for countering extremism within the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the so-called "E" centers, has brought a lot of benefits, but also caused well-founded criticism, which has only intensified since then. The main positive result was the improvement in the quality of police work in relation to violent hate crimes and in general the investigation of the activities of truly dangerous groups [20] .

The negative consequences, in our opinion, boil down to the fact that, firstly, the employees of the "E" centers, transferred from the departments for combating organized crime, brought with them the brutal methods of operational work adopted there, and secondly, the very existence of a separate structures with special reporting should have contributed to inflating this reporting at the expense of minor or completely fictional crimes and offenses.

Centers "E" are presented with three more significant claims: a large number of procedural violations of various kinds, "pro-fascist" sympathies of some of the employees and the actual "political investigation", that is, monitoring political, civil, religious activists for reasons that are not related to ordinary criminal law . These claims are also quite solid, but they are just not specific to this particular structure.

Frequent procedural violations, alas, are inherent in our law enforcement agencies as a whole, and the “E” centers do not stand out against this background. With regard to the political and ideological sympathies of employees, xenophobic prejudices in the police as a whole are widespread to the same extent as in the whole society. In addition, constant work with political radicals cannot but have a radicalizing effect on the existing moods of at least some of the employees (this kind of deformation is well known in other examples).

Reasons to talk about "political investigation" inevitably arise when operational work is carried out related to ideologically motivated crimes. After all, the environment of the suspect falls into the sphere of operational work, which includes many activists of various kinds, who are far from criminal intentions. This happens in every country. In modern Russia, this problem is exacerbated by the exorbitant breadth of the definition of "extremism". But not by the very existence of "E" centers. While they were gone, the same functions were performed by other police units. And in recent years, the expansion of anti-extremist law enforcement has also led to the expansion of relevant operational activities, so that the listed shortcomings of the police have become more noticeable.

Another thing is that within the framework of a large specialized structure, the above shortcomings can further develop due to the inevitable "cheating reporting" and mutual influence of employees, so the Main Directorate for Combating Extremism and its regional centers require additional attention from society.

We are compelled to specifically address the topic of E-Centers in this report, as reports of their misconduct increased markedly in 2011. Apparently, this is due to the general intensification of political life in the pre-election year, and many episodes - and directly with the elections.

At the direction of the “E” centers, or directly by their forces, entire circulations of newspapers (for example, “Izvestiya Kaliningrad” or the newspaper of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation “Pora” in Irkutsk) were confiscated, allegedly for examination, although this practice is obviously illegal. The seizure of the PARNAS party election leaflet in Ulyanovsk was motivated by the alleged violation of campaign financing norms, so it is not clear why the E center should have been involved in this.

It is not uncommon, however, for E centers to go about other than their own business. For example, they participate in raids on violators of the migration regime. It could be assumed that they are looking for someone who commits extremist crimes among the “illegals”, but judging by the fact that we do not know the relevant cases, in this case the “eshniki” are simply working in the wings.

But more often, doing something other than one's own is just an appearance covering up pressure on activists who are objectionable either to someone in power, or directly to individual leaders of anti-extremist units. A striking example of this is the persecution of an employee of the St. Petersburg Anti-Discrimination Center "Memorial" Philip Kostenko. He repeatedly reported threats from employees of the "E" center. In December 2011, Kostenko was sentenced twice in a row to 15 days under administrative charges, which in itself was typical for the December events, but it is noteworthy that both court hearings devoted to offenses that did not belong to their department were attended by employees of the "E" center , and in the first case they even played an active role - the court accepted from them as evidence a certain “certificate” on Kostenko (this fact was later successfully appealed). Literally on the day of his release from a month-long arrest, a trial was held on the case of vandalism, which was previously opened against Kostenko, at which the prosecution demanded that he be taken into custody. The court refused, but the very attempt not to release the activist is evident. (Since then, already in early 2012, Kostenko was severely beaten by unknown persons, but no case has been opened on this fact at the time of writing the report.)

Obviously illegal methods of pressure are used in any division of the Russian police, and we do not even consider them. But the non-illegal methods of moral pressure on the interrogated - not necessarily suspects, more often simply called in for a conversation - which are practiced in the "E" centers, often raise doubts. For example, in Saratov, an anti-fascist activist, who was detained while distributing anti-fascist leaflets during the “Russian march”, was forced to testify against other left-wing activists, threatening him with punishment for distributing “Nazi symbols” - a crossed-out swastika on the same anti-fascist leaflet.

MAIN AREAS OF PERSECUTION  

Religious groups Freedom of conscience suffers from unlawful anti-extremism, at least not less than other civil liberties. And if we are talking specifically about the application of anti-extremist legislation, then the illegal (or at least obviously excessive) persecution of various religious groups quantitatively exceeds the illegal persecution of political and civil activists, although the latter are more noticeable to society.

Here we must start with various Muslim groups and currents, both religious (like the followers of Said Nursi) and religious-political (including the Hizb ut-Tahrir party, which rejects violence, and militant groups in the North Caucasus). According to the established tradition, the most dangerous groups and trends associated with the actual use of violence (practicing it or calling for it), as a rule, are prosecuted using anti-terrorist legislation without resorting to anti-extremist legislation [21] , although the latter is still occasionally used [ 22 ] .

The actual anti-extremist legislation applies primarily to the Hizb ut-Tahrir party, which was banned as a terrorist party. We consider such a decision unlawful, since Hizb ut-Tahrir itself does not practice violence and does not call for it (with some not so significant exceptions). The public danger of Hizb ut-Tahrir propaganda deserves to be studied [23] , so that some measures against this organization could be possible. But now people accused of belonging to Hizb ut-Tahrir are most often prosecuted only under Art. 282 ² Criminal Code for participation in a banned organization, and we consider them wrongfully convicted, since the very ban on the organization was wrongful. According to Elena Ryabinina (Institute of Human Rights), out of about 35 wrongfully or disproportionately severely convicted imprisoned Muslim activists known to her, about two-thirds were convicted specifically on charges of involvement in Hizb ut-Tahrir.

Injunctions against various party materials continue, and their content often seems to be disregarded, as texts are often banned that do not in themselves contain anything that would meet the definition of extremism. Obviously, materials are routinely banned due to their party affiliation, but this does not comply with the law. If the legislator considered any materials of banned organizations to be extremist, this would be reflected in the definition of the latter in the law.

We have noted before that the peak of the campaign against this party has clearly passed. It should be noted that the persecution of Hizb ut-Tahrir is now geographically very uneven. The bulk of sentences falls on the Volga region, mainly in Tatarstan and Bashkortostan. In 2011, we know the sentences for this grouping only in these republics and in Moscow - a total of 19 convicts (four were sentenced on probation, the rest - for terms from 6 months to 2.5 years) and all only for participation in the organization (Article 282 ² UK), and not for the content of their propaganda. Although Hizb ut-Tahrir operates much more widely and, according to some reports, even gradually comes out of the underground. This suggests that the central and some regional authorities, without lifting the ban, are trying to pursue a more flexible policy in this case. But, of course, such informal “relaxations” are not the best way to resolve the problem.

Other religious and political Muslim organizations are being persecuted as part of the anti-extremist campaign to a lesser extent: some because, as already mentioned, anti-terrorist legislation is applied to them, others because of their lesser prevalence. As a matter of fact, persecution of members of the majority of banned Muslim organizations is unknown to us (perhaps these organizations do not conduct any activity in Russia). The persecution of Tablighi Jamaat, which was also banned without proper reason, is known. In 2011, two people in Ulan-Ude were convicted for participation in this movement, for 10 and 12 months probation, but there are cases of administrative pressure on groups of Muslims who were found to have texts related to Tablighi Jamaat.

In 2011, repressions against the followers of Said Nursi intensified sharply, although it is difficult to find any reasonable grounds for persecuting this movement. During the year, 9 people were convicted for membership in the non-existent, but, nevertheless, banned organization "Nurcular" [24] , and in fact - for spreading the teachings of Nursi, including a whole group of six people in Nizhny Novgorod. Moreover, four out of nine were sentenced to real terms of imprisonment, from 8 months to 1.5 years [25] . New criminal cases have also been opened. In particular, the case under Art. 282 ² The Criminal Code, instituted against two imams, Ilkhom Merazhov and Kamil Odilov [26] . It can already be said that the followers of Nursi are persecuted more often than representatives of other religious movements.

It is because of this that the total number of wrongfully convicted Muslim activists in 2011 rose to 30 people - compared to the previous two years, 14 people each.

An even greater resonance than the Merazhov case was caused by the case of Aidar Khabibullin, director of the Sad publishing group, and Eduard Gabdrakhmanov, who had previously served time under Art. 282 ² UK [27] . Both were arrested in October 2010 and are charged with distributing leaflets inciting hatred, as well as possession of ammunition. It is difficult for us to assess the accusation on its merits, since we do not know the content of the leaflet, it is not known whether the defendants distributed it, one or both. We also cannot assess the credibility of the defense's assertion that the ammunition was planted. It can only be argued that the well-known publishing activity of A. Khabibullin does not fit with the storage of grenades at home. Claims against the actual publications of the Garden are based on the conclusions of experts who managed to see signs of extremism in calls to live according to Sharia in a medieval treatise and in an abundance of scenes of violence in a textbook on military history. And the first vice-speaker of the Federation Council, Alexander Torshin, immediately after his arrest, said that Khabibullin was the “leader” of the Nurjular organization, who trained suicide bombers through hypnosis [28] . It is difficult to get rid of the feeling that the case, whose trial began in September 2011, is largely falsified [29] .

However, it is not always possible to prove charges, even very serious ones, in court. For example, on May 31 in Novy Urengoy, a court refused to liquidate the Muslim community of Nur Islam on the basis of unconvincingly proven facts of the dissemination of prohibited texts and undocumented operational information about the community's links to terrorism (and the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation upheld this decision).

The European Court of Human Rights communicated in 2011 two complaints from different groups of Muslims in connection with the ban in 2007, respectively, of 17 books, mostly Salafi, in Buguruslan and 14 books of Said Nursi in Moscow. In both cases, the ECtHR, as required by procedure, sent questions to the Russian authorities. In particular, it needs to be clarified whether these prohibitions were precisely “necessary in a democratic society”, as required by Articles 9 and 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. In the Buguruslan case, it is also required to clarify whether the applicants' rights were not violated by the fact that the Muslim community was not invited to the court session.

The decision of the ECtHR on the first issue may finally affect the arbitrary practice of restrictions on religious (and possibly other) public statements. The second issue, which is procedural in nature, is also very important: in the case when the “accused” in court is a text, and not a person, it is necessary to develop reasonable criteria for which people and organizations are interested parties in such a process.

In addition to Hizb ut-Tahrir and the followers of Nursi, Jehovah's Witnesses remain one of the priority objects of "countering extremism". The scale of diverse persecution of this religious movement is growing every year [30] , and accusations of extremism, based solely on the fact that the Witnesses assert the superiority of their faith, do not stop.

In relation to the Witnesses, about a dozen cases under Art. 282 and 282 ² UK. The case brought to court a year earlier under Art. 282 of the Criminal Code against Alexander Kalistratov, head of the organization of Jehovah's Witnesses in Gorno-Altaisk, ran into mass resistance from human rights activists, including the official intervention of the federal Commissioner for Human Rights. On April 14, the court acquitted Kalistratov. The prosecutor's office appealed the verdict, the case was returned for a new trial, and on November 3 the same court found Kalistratov guilty, however, issued a rather mild sentence - 100 hours of compulsory work. And on December 22, this sentence was overturned by the Supreme Court of the Altai Republic for lack of corpus delicti.

During the year, new preaching texts by Jehovah's Witnesses were banned by the courts. Decisions were made to block access to Witness websites. They tried, with varying success, to bring the believers themselves to administrative responsibility for distributing these materials. We can state that the Witnesses are under constant "anti-extremist" pressure.

The fight against "religious extremism" in modern Russia is closely connected with the concept of "non-traditional" of certain religions or movements in big religions. Therefore, the main objects of unlawful anti-extremist sanctions are precisely those movements that can be classified as “non-traditional”, for example, such new religious movements [31] as Hare Krishnas, Scientologists or Falun Dafa practitioners.

The Church of Scientology fends off "anti-extremist attacks" with varying degrees of success. On February 2, 2011, a rare decision of the Surgut court came into force. The court overturned its own ban on 29 texts by Scientology founder Ron Hubbard, recognizing such a ban as an attack on freedom of conscience. Scientologists even got these 29 texts removed from the Federal List of Extremist Materials. Later, Novy Urengoy failed to ban Hubbard's biography. On the other hand, in Moscow on June 20 and in Naberezhnye Chelny on August 24, two new large packages of Scientology materials were declared extremist. In Moscow, the case under Art. 282 of the Criminal Code on the distribution of Scientology materials (more precisely, one case was closed, and then another was opened).

On October 27, 2011, the Pervomaisky District Court of Krasnodar again, after lengthy litigation [32] , banned four texts distributed by followers of the religious practice of Falun Dafa, and on December 26 this decision came into force. In this case, in addition to the fundamental religious treatise Zhuan Falun and two leaflets of completely neutral content, the report of Canadian human rights activists on the removal of organs from Falun Dafa practitioners in China was also banned. Accordingly, extremism in this case was seen not only in preaching the superiority of one's faith, but also in statements against the Chinese government.

A great, including international, resonance was caused by the case of the banning of the fundamental Hare Krishna treatise "Bhagavad Gita As It Is". Even the experts involved by the prosecutor's office said in court that they did not see anything extremist in Swami Prabhupada's comments on the Bhagavad Gita. Ultimately, on 28 December 2011, the Leninsky District Court of Tomsk refused to satisfy the prosecutor's claim, but she appealed the decision.

An interesting litigation turned into an attempt to ban the slogan “Orthodoxy or death!” depicted on a T-shirt, which is characteristic of Orthodox fundamentalists, also a kind of religious minority [33] . The slogan was understood by the prosecutor's office as a call to violence, although it is used in practice in the sense of a readiness to remain faithful to Orthodoxy even at the cost of life. Back in 2010, two Moscow prosecutor's offices simultaneously undertook the preparation of a lawsuit, as a result, two Moscow courts made opposite decisions regarding the extremist nature of the slogan. Both decisions were then disputed for a long time by both sides. The prosecutor's office that lost the lawsuit actually refused to support it further in November, and the case was closed. And the second is still going on, and the head of the workshop for the production of T-shirts is the opponent of the prosecutor's office. He managed to restore the appeal period, but since the ban came into force, the slogan has already been included in the Federal List.

2011 brought new plots of anti-extremist persecution for criticizing religion or profanation, according to the prosecutor's office, of religious symbols. The main one is the case of B. Obraztsov described above. A little earlier, on May 20, blogger Dmitry Lebedev was convicted in Gatchina, Leningrad Region, under Part 1 of Art. 282 of the Criminal Code for 1 year of imprisonment conditionally for a number of statements "VKontakte", offensive to Patriarch Kirill and the clergy of the Russian Orthodox Church.

In August, Alexander Savko's painting "The Sermon on the Mount" from the series "Mickey Mouse's Journey Through Art History" was banned. On the reproduction of the old engraving, Savko replaced the figure of Christ with the figure of Mickey Mouse. The prosecution's argument, accepted by the court, is based solely on the notion that the manipulation of the engraving is an attempt on Jesus Christ himself and, therefore, an insult to the feelings of believers. Attempts to somehow combine these arguments with the definition of extremist activity in the law looked completely unconvincing [34] .

Political and civil activists In the pre-election year, it would be natural to expect an increase in illegal actions against opposition political organizations and civil activists. Such misconduct, as a rule, is not related to the actual application of anti-extremist legislation, so the following cannot be understood as a report on the persecution of activists in general. Our task is more modest - to point out how anti-extremist tools are used unlawfully for this.

One of the most popular during the pre-election period is the withdrawal from circulation of campaign materials - newspapers, leaflets, videos - on the mere suspicion of extremism. Suspicion then, as a rule, is removed, but it is too late to use these materials. During the parliamentary campaign of 2007, this mechanism was used very widely [35] , while the campaign of 2011 was used much more modestly. But still, newspapers and leaflets were confiscated in the bud "for examination" from a variety of organizations - from the leaflets of the NaKh-NaKh movement and the pamphlet of the leader of the National Socialist Initiative Dmitry Bobrov to the newspapers of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and Just Russia. Similar cases were noted everywhere, from Chita to St. Petersburg. Perhaps the widespread use of this unacceptable method was not a planned campaign, but such a practice cannot be called isolated excesses.

Local electoral commissions also contributed. There are two cases (in the Astrakhan and Sverdlovsk regions) of the removal of Just Russia commercials from the air, in which the election commissions saw “inciting social hatred” against the authorities (the election commissions did not order, but recommended not to show these videos).

During 2011, a variety of political activists were subjected to unlawful anti-extremist harassment.

You can start with members of the Other Russia party led by Eduard Limonov (not to be confused with the movement of the same name, which used to include Limonovites). They sometimes call themselves, sometimes they don’t call themselves National Bolsheviks, but justice sees no reason to doubt that they are precisely National Bolsheviks, that is, the successors of the case of the banned - we believe, as a result of a judicial error - the National Bolshevik Party, and, probably, any political scientist with will agree to this. But the continuation of the activities of the NBP involves prosecution under Art. 282 ² The Criminal Code is thus transferred from the field of political science to the field of law, in which this issue is no longer so simple. It is rather difficult to understand what exactly is a continuation of the activity of a banned organization, and what is simply the activity of its former member, which in itself is not prohibited by law, but, naturally, is somewhat similar to the activity of the organization in which the activist was a member. This incomprehensible norm in criminal law, unfortunately, has not yet received any clarification, therefore, in specific cases, the courts, at their own discretion, accept or reject certain evidence that it is precisely the composition of Art. 282 ² UK. In particular, it is obvious that the persecution of members of the Other Russia under this article of the Criminal Code is very selective, as was the case with the National Bolsheviks before, when they were directly called that.

Not a single National Bolshevik was convicted in 2011, but this does not mean that criminal prosecutions have ceased. For example, at the beginning of the year under Art. 282 ² The Criminal Code activist Nikolai Avdyushenkov of The Other Russia was convicted, but the sentence was later canceled, as it turned out that the statute of limitations had expired.

By the end of the year, several criminal cases were in various stages of investigation. The largest of them is the case of the St. Petersburg organization headed by Andrei Dmitriev, initiated after its active participation in the nationalist demonstration on December 11, 2010. The number of defendants gradually grew to 13 people (all of them are under house arrest, but one went abroad) . In itself, the investigation of that demonstration, as well as the more famous events of that day in Moscow, seems to us completely legitimate. But from the very beginning it was suspicious that it was the National Bolsheviks who were the object of the investigation, although on that day the main role did not belong to them. However, the investigation, which ended in November, bypassed the events of December 11 and focused on proving the continued activities of the NBP by the accused, under Art. 282 ² UK.

In late November - early December, a case under the same article was initiated in Moscow. But there are no suspects in the case yet.

Charges under Art. 282 and 282 ² The Criminal Code was also presented in 2011 to Igor Popov and Alexander Kurov in Vladivostok, and to Kurov also under Art. 280. The trial in this case is not over yet. The trial in Murmansk over Inna Marinina also began under Art. 282 ² UK.

Note that in parallel, the National Bolsheviks in Vladivostok were acquitted on charges of using symbols similar to Nazi ones for a leaflet against the “E” center, which actually contained an image stylized as a Gestapo badge.

On December 7, in Komsomolsk-on-Amur, . Anton Lukin, accused under Art 282 ² . However, Lukin was released from custody by the end of January, and as a result, he and Svetlana Kuznetsova were presented with other articles - paragraph “a” of part 2 of Art. 282 (“Actions aimed at inciting hatred and enmity, committed with the use of violence or with the threat of its use”), Part 1 of Art. 280 (“Public calls for extremist activity”) and part 3 of Art. 212 of the Criminal Code ("Calls for riots") - for distributing the leaflet "Victory will be behind us!" and the newspaper "Vysshaya merada". The trial of the case began in February 2012. Unfortunately, we do not know the content of the materials that Lukin and Kuznetsova are accused of distributing, so we cannot assess the degree of legitimacy of the accusation.

One of the most important phenomena of today's radical politics is the complex relationship in the triangle "police - far right - far left". And one of the most discussed aspects of this relationship is the persecution that law enforcement agencies subject to far-left and anti-fascist activists precisely for their anti-fascist activities. There is no doubt that such a phenomenon as “militant antifa” attacks on the far right exists, that is, quite a lot of violent crimes are committed in the name of anti-fascist ideas. Accordingly, a criminal investigation is inevitable, often including all sorts of unlawful actions, including bringing the innocent to justice and “routine”, especially for radical youth, beatings during arrests and interrogations.

In order to legally qualify attacks on the far right as crimes of an extremist nature, an appropriate motive must be specified. This is where problems usually arise. For example, in the case of five young anti-fascists from Nizhny Novgorod, they were charged with a number of violent crimes (the proof of which is doubtful, but this is a separate problem) and the creation of an extremist community for this purpose, the motive of whose activity was described, in addition to “establishing anarchy”, as “the use of violence against motives of ideological hatred and enmity towards the social groups “skinheads, football fans” and “wealthy citizens of Russia” . Once again, we are faced with a completely arbitrary use of the expression "social group". And it is unreasonable to incriminate hostility towards the "skinheads" group, which the investigation calls "red skinheads".

The Nizhny Novgorod case was brought to court only in February 2012. But in St. Petersburg, a similar case of attacks on ultra-rightists ended back in January 2011 with the conviction of four people to conditional imprisonment under paragraph “a” of Part 2 of Art. 282 of the Criminal Code for " humiliation of the dignity of a group of persons on the grounds of belonging to any social group, publicly, with the use of violence ." And the “social group” was thus designated as follows: “Russian nationalists”.

The point, we repeat, is not that attacks on “Russian nationalists” are less criminal than any other attacks, but precisely in the ridiculous qualification of this act. Such use of the concept of “hate motive” present in the Criminal Code violates common sense in terms of understanding a “social group” and distorts the essence of the very concept of hate crimes (in the Russian version - “crimes motivated by hatred”), designed to create additional protection not for any conceivable multitude of people, but specifically to vulnerable social groups and strata.

In previous years, such “social groups” as government officials and law enforcement officers most often appeared in indictments and sentences. However, it seems that in 2011 there was a turning point in this trend, and it began to take shape even before the June clarifications of the Supreme Court regarding criticism of the authorities.

Last year we know of only one court decision based on the protection of the authorities as a “social group”. Left-wing activist Andrei Kutuzov was convicted under Art. 280 of the Criminal Code (“Public calls for extremist activity”) to two years of suspended imprisonment for distributing a leaflet with calls to use violence against the police. Again the latter was recognized as a protected social group. However, the case as a whole looks unconvincing: the leaflet, in the production and distribution of which Kutuzov was accused, has clear signs of falsification.

In May, in Magnitogorsk, a criminal case was initiated in defense of the same “social group” under Art. 282 of the Criminal Code on the fact of the publication on the Internet of a video called "Fascists in uniform". This completely unlawful case is still being investigated and is actually directed against local trade union activists Andrei and Olesya Romanov.

The most famous case of this kind was the case against members of the Voina art group Oleg Vorotnikov and Leonid Nikolaev for overturning a police car, committed back in 2010. The action "Palace coup" was qualified as hooliganism motivated by hatred towards the social group of policemen. However, in the summer of 2011, the experts involved in the case came to the conclusion that the police are not a social group, and thus the charge of hooliganism was dropped (because, according to the strange disposition of Article 213 of the Criminal Code, hooliganism is possible either with the use of weapons or for the motive of hatred; the weapon was clearly not used). As a result, on December 1, the case under Art. 213 was closed (on the second attempt) [37] . At the same time, the investigation refused to prosecute the accused under Part 1 of Art. 167 of the Criminal Code (“Deliberate destruction or damage to property”) “ since the property damage caused by the actions of the latter is not significant for the Central Internal Affairs Directorate for St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region as a legal entity .”

However, another case has been opened against Vorotnikov - about an attack on policemen during a rally on March 31. In this case, the accusation also looks strange. Application of Art. 319 (“Public insult to a representative of the authorities in the performance of their official duties or in connection with their performance”) and Part 1 of Art. 318 (“The use of violence that is not dangerous to life or health, or the threat of violence against a representative of the authorities or his relatives in connection with the performance of his official duties”) looks convincing, but for some reason the same hooliganism was added to them based on hate.

Another example of a reversal of the trend: precisely because of the refusal to recognize the authorities as a protected group, the charge under Art. 282 of the Criminal Code against Anatoly Yurkovets, an activist of the Left Front, who was convicted on February 3 in Omsk for a fight with political opponents [38] .

On the other hand, the accusation of actions motivated by political and ideological enmity is gradually coming into practice. Actually, S. Yurkovets was convicted under paragraph “b” of Part 1 of Art. 213 (“Hooliganism motivated by political, ideological hatred or enmity”) and Art. 329 (“Desecration of the State Flag of the Russian Federation”). The fight as such was no doubt motivated by political animosity, but the qualification under Art. 213 of the Criminal Code still seems strange: it is difficult to imagine a combination of a hooligan motive and a political hatred motive in one act. Obviously, the content of Art. 213 of the Criminal Code should be adjusted to avoid such contradictions, and the actions of a person convicted of a fight motivated by political enmity could be qualified under an article corresponding to the damage caused (from beatings to murder).

In February, an even more surprising case of political hostility began. Three anarchists in Barnaul were accused of sticking the heads of famous politicians, starting with Putin and Medvedev, on an educational poster depicting various venereal disease germs and the slogan "Do you need such fellow travelers?" These actions were qualified as Part 2 of Art. 213 of the Criminal Code (“Hooliganism motivated by political hatred, committed by a group of persons by prior agreement”). The investigation continues.

We have recorded unlawful persecution more than once in relation to nationalists (both Russian ethno-nationalists and others). In 2011, in addition to the aforementioned case of K. Krylov, we cannot name other obviously illegally initiated criminal cases (although, of course, there are controversial cases). On the other hand, there were other, not so significant, episodes, for example, the seizure of the entire circulation of a brochure for verification.

An interesting example is the requirement of the prosecutor's office to two Cossack organizations, in the Kaluga region and in the Stavropol Territory, to cancel the discriminatory, from the point of view of the prosecutor's office, provision of the charter that only Orthodox can be members of the organization. Discrimination is defined in Russian law as a violation of rights based on discrimination. But a Russian citizen does not have the right to be a member of a public organization of his choice, this also cannot be considered a legitimate interest, and the legislator has not limited organizations in determining the criteria for membership in them.

The pressure on the Volya party of Svetlana Peunova is gradually increasing. The worldview of this organization combines elements of ethno-nationalism, Stalinism and the leader's own mystical views. The party is actively involved in political life (S. Peunova even tried to run for president in 2012, but did not collect the required number of signatures), distributes books by Peunova, newspapers and leaflets. All these texts combine emotional criticism of the political regime and modern bureaucracy with general reasoning and literary experiments, sometimes raising doubts about the intellectual adequacy of the authors.

In 2011, a clearly unlawful criminal case was closed against the Khabarovsk Volya activist Natalya Ignatieva for a satirical poem, but two new ones were opened, in Vologda and Kirov, on the facts of distribution of the leaflet "Do Russians want war?". The leaflet did not contain illegal appeals, the most radical in it was a call for a boycott of "corrupt national clans". In Vladimir, the prosecutor's office is seeking a ban on one of S. Peunova's books, apparently for inciting hostility towards officials.

The law enforcement campaign continues against publications and organizations associated with publicist Yuri Mukhin. Mukhin and his supporters combine Stalinism and xenophobia in such proportions that they have more than once become objects of quite legitimate law enforcement. But the main repressive decisions against them are based on the unlawful banning of the leaflet “You have chosen - you will judge”, which calls for changing the Constitution in such a way that officials who do not please the people can be outlawed as a punishment. On February 22, 2011, the Judicial Collegium of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation upheld the decision of the Moscow City Court of October 19, 2010 to ban the Mukhinian movement "Army of the Will of the People" (AVN). Against Mukhin himself, as already mentioned, a criminal case was unlawfully initiated under Art. 282 of the Criminal Code on charges of anti-Semitic propaganda.

On January 21, a case against Andrey Yermolenko, a Chelyabinsk AVN activist, was opened and on December 28 closed. He was accused of publishing two articles inciting hatred against officials and the police. In the end, the investigator decided to close the case, relying on the June decision of the plenum of the Supreme Court, which specifically emphasized that criticism of the authorities is not a crime. The fact that the Decree has already started working inspires a certain optimism.

Media stories The main form of “anti-extremist” pressure on the media remains warnings issued by the prosecution authorities and a specialized government agency, Roskomnadzor. The prosecutor's office does not publish statistics on this activity, but Roskomnadzor does. In 2011, he issued 25 warnings to media outlets for carrying out extremist activities, of which at least a dozen were issued illegally.

In disputes about the legitimacy of warnings, an important role is played by the not entirely clear status of the act itself: is the warning just a preventive measure, a way to prevent the editors from going beyond the law, or is the warning the beginning of the procedure for closing the publication? Actually, both are true. Of course, the warning is of a preventive nature, and it can be assumed that major media outlets are not in danger of being closed on such grounds. But the warning, in contrast to the warning that the editor-in-chief can receive, is written into the law as a prerequisite for closing the publication. In practice, the presence of two warnings in a year (or a little more) often becomes the basis for filing a closure claim [39] . Therefore, we believe that in order to issue a warning, the supervisory authority must see not just something “fraught with extremism”, but a real, albeit small, violation of the law.

Alas, this is not always the case. Here are just a few examples. The newspaper Lyubimiy Gorod in Shatura near Moscow and the newspaper Evening Tyumen received warnings for quoting Hitler in a far from pro-Hitler context. The very subject of the claim is very strange: the existing legislative ban on the distribution of the works of the leaders of the NSDAP cannot in any way mean a ban on citation. Several nationalist Cossack newspapers received a series of warnings. Some of the warnings were issued for articles whose only "extremism" was in calls for the creation of some kind of "Cossack republic."

The only newspaper closed in 2011 for extremist activity was the newspaper “To Barrier”, published by the aforementioned Yuri Mukhin. In this case, the decision of the Moscow City Court of April 13, 2011 to close the newspaper [40] does not seem legitimate to us. It was based on the fact that Mukhin had previously lost in court, appealing against both warnings issued to the newspaper. But both of them were wrong. The first one referred to the leaflet “You have chosen - you will be the judge”, about the illegality of the ban on which we have already written more than once. The second - to Mukhin's article, in which anti-Semitism was seen. Of course, anti-Semitism is present in it, but in a completely non-inflammatory form (see above about the case instituted on this occasion).

At the same time, much more significant claims could be made against Mukhin's newspapers. The newspaper Svoimy Inamy, the successor to K Barrier, has already received two warnings for clearly calling for an armed uprising, and Roskomnadzor is already seeking its closure in court.

Sometimes journalists and editors-in-chief are also brought to criminal liability, most often under Art. 282 of the Criminal Code. However, it should be recognized that this pressure mechanism does not operate automatically. The most significant and well-known example: on July 5, 2011, the Supreme Court of Dagestan confirmed the acquittal of the journalists of the Chernovik newspaper. No less important was the termination of the case against the journalists of the Vechernyaya Tyumen newspaper [41] .

Examples when journalists would be wrongfully convicted under Art. 282 of the Criminal Code, we cannot name, in addition to the case of Boris Obraztsov described above, but proceedings in a number of cases continue. It was only at the end of the year that the trial of the leaders of the Vechernyaya Ryazan newspaper began, although in this case the incitement of hostility is imputed not only to the police, but also to the Jews, and so far the prospects for this process are unclear.

SOME STATISTICS Anti-extremist legislation has been applied on a fairly large scale in recent years. In 2010, 297 people were convicted of violent hate crimes, 78 for very real hate propaganda, and 21 for vandalism for ideological reasons. In 2011, the numbers were slightly lower - 189, 75 and 12, respectively. Against this backdrop, the number of convictions that we consider to be illegal is quite small, which is why we have not attempted to present statistics in previous reports on “illegal anti-extremism”. But this time we will try, partly summing up the above.

3 or 4 people were wrongfully convicted under Art. 282 of the Criminal Code - B. Obraztsov and I. Dedyukhova (the latter was fined for rude anti-Semitic texts, but without any specific appeals), as well as one follower of Said Nursi in conjunction with Art. 282 ² UK. Almost certainly, D. Lebedev, mentioned above, was also wrongfully convicted.

3 people were wrongfully convicted under Art. 280 of the Criminal Code - A. Kutuzov and two young men in Kemerovo (for anti-police leaflets; their content is unknown to us, but the protection of the police as a "social group" is unacceptable).

Traditionally, a large number of sentences, which we consider as unlawful, are given by Art. 282 ² UK. In 2011, under it (as well as under other “extremist” articles), not a single nationalist Bolshevik was convicted. On the other hand, many sentences were handed down for "alleged" membership in banned Muslim organizations: 9 followers of Said Nursi, two members of Tablighi Jamaat, and 19 members of Hizb ut-Tahrir.

Finally, we consider the conviction of four St. Petersburg anti-fascists for attacking neo-Nazis partially unlawful, since the object of the attack was described as a “social group”.

Despite the general tendency to impose non-custodial sentences for non-violent “extremist” crimes (most often suspended sentences or fines), there are exceptions [42] . Two Kemerovo agitators were sentenced to 8 months in prison, three of the six Nizhny Novgorod followers of Nursi and one more in Orenburg received real terms (but he was released in January 2012, since the sentence was commuted to a fine), but for membership in " Hizb ut-Tahrir, all 10 convicts in Tatarstan were actually imprisoned, both in Moscow and three out of seven in Bashkortostan.

While our data on criminal law enforcement appears to be complete or nearly complete, the application of the “anti-extremist” articles of the Code of Administrative Offenses is known to a much lesser extent. Let us give at least the data we have (minus the decisions that were canceled by a higher court already in 2012).

For the mass distribution of extremist materials or for possession for the purpose of such distribution, that is, under Art. 20.29 of the Code of Administrative Offenses, 9 people were wrongfully fined, including 5 librarians, as well as at least one legal entity - a colony, in whose library books of Jehovah's Witnesses were found. As a rule, there was no mass distribution at all, and often there was no actual extremist material. Sometimes the court even took the side of the accused in these matters. So in Perm, it was confirmed in two instances that a quote from Hitler in itself is not a prohibited material.

For the public demonstration of Nazi or similar symbols, that is, under Art. 20.3 of the Code of Administrative Offenses of the Russian Federation, 6 people were wrongfully fined, including 4 dealers in antiques.

The federal list of extremist materials was replenished in 2011 by 318 items. Not in all cases, we can definitely judge the legality of the ban, since we are not always familiar with the material itself. In a number of cases, materials were explicitly banned simply by association with an already banned organization, such as Hizb ut-Tahrir, but the court was unlikely to seriously analyze the banned texts themselves.

Undoubtedly, over the past year, 16 materials of Jehovah's Witnesses have been illegally included in the list, 4 articles from one site that has already been deleted, denouncing Russia for the oppression of the small peoples of the North, 1 book by Said Nursi, 2 T-shirts with the slogans “Russia for Russians” and “Orthodoxy or death! ”, 2 large Internet services - www.liveinternet.ru and www.tatarlar.ru and 2 sites - www.limonka.nbp-info.ru and www.nbp-info.ru, total - 27 points.

It is more difficult to make an unambiguous judgment on a number of religious, primarily Islamic, publications, in which the reader is clearly and quite persistently set against the Gentiles, but there is no direct incitement to any illegal actions in the texts. In principle, such texts can be considered as inciting enmity towards non-Christians, so they are not mentioned above.

In total, we consider the ban on 56 Muslim materials, including those of Hizb ut-Tahrir, to be doubtful. Some of them certainly do not contain anything socially dangerous (like two old issues of the Caliphate magazine banned in Moscow), although some others were probably inflammatory.

Some other prohibitions are also questionable, for example, the prohibition of Konstantin Rodzaevsky's "Testament of a Russian Fascist", which has only historical significance. And I repeat, the bans on many other materials on the list, the content of which is unknown to us, may also turn out to be doubtful.

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[1] See, for example: Levinson Lev. Extremism will be fought in a Stalinist way // Russian Bulletin on Human Rights. 2002. No. 16; Verkhovsky A. State against radical nationalism. What to do and what not to do? Moscow: 2002, pp. 105–118; He is. Anti-extremist legislation and abuses in its application // SOVA Center. 2008. May 27 ( http://www.sova-center.ru/racism-xenophobia/publications/2008/05/d13425/ ).

[2] Our understanding of “illegal anti-extremism” is described in more detail in the introduction to: Verkhovsky A. Illegal application of anti-extremist legislation in Russia in 2009 // SOVA Center. 2010. March 22 ( http://www.sova-center.ru/misuse/publications/2010/03/d18261/#r1 ).

[3] The SOVA Center played an active role in drafting the project. The project was presented to the President at a meeting on July 5 by Council member Valentin Gefter, and President Medvedev even agreed that there was a subject for concern, but in September Gefter received a response from the Legal Department of the Administration, completely rejecting this project.

[4] Alperovich Vera, Verkhovsky Alexander, Yudina Natalia. Between Manezhnaya and Bolotnaya: Xenophobia and radical nationalism and opposition to them in 2011 in Russia // SOVA Center. 2012. February 24 ( http://www.sova-center.ru/racism-xenophobia/publications/2012/02/d23739/ ).

[5] The text of the Decree of the Plenum of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation No. 11 “On judicial practice in criminal cases on crimes of an extremist orientation” dated June 28, 2011 // Website of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation. 2011. June 29 ( http://www.supcourt.ru/Show_pdf.php?Id=7315 ). See also: SOVA's commentary on the Resolution of the Plenum of the Supreme Court on extremism // SOVA Center. 2011. July 1 ( http://sova-center.ru/misuse/publications/2011/07/d22010/ ).

[6] Although it should also be borne in mind that according to Art. 280 and 282 ² unjust sentences are also handed down.

[7] The text of the decision of the ECtHR is available on the website of the Perm Commissioner for Human Rights ( http://ombudsman.perm.ru/_res/fs/file979.doc ).

[8] The last of them: Rosalskaya Mary. Illegal application of anti-extremist legislation in Russia in 2010 // SOVA Center. 2011. March 25 ( http://www.sova-center.ru/misuse/publications/2011/03/d21249/ )

[9] P. 2 Art. 14 of the Criminal Code establishes: "An action (inaction) is not a crime, although formally containing signs of any act provided for by this Code, but due to its insignificance, it does not pose a public danger."

[10] The unexpected intensification of the case in December, as far as we know, did not continue in the first month and a half of 2012, although Obraztsov took an active part in the protest movement.

[11] For more on this, see: Alperovich V., Verkhovsky A., Yudina N. Between Manezhnaya and Bolotnaya.

[12] See: Rozalskaya M. Illegal application of anti-extremist legislation in Russia in 2010.

[13] Supreme Court. Definition No. 58-Vpr11-2 // Website of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation. 2011. May 10 ( http://www.vsrf.ru/print_page.php?id=7647 ).

[14] We do not know for sure about most of the checks. We often know about a whole series of inspections, but we do not always know the number of warnings issued and other acts of the prosecutor's response. In such cases, we counted the entire series as one.

[15] See about this Rozalskaya M. Illegal anti-extremism in the first half of 2011.

[16] You can read more about this in a brochure published by the State Public Historical Library of Russia with the participation of the SOVA Center: Libraries work with the Federal List of Extremist Materials. M: GPIB, 2011.

[17] The scoring method is as conservative as described above for Internet filter testing.

[18] For templates of relevant documents, see: Working with the Federal List of Extremist Materials Libraries.

[19] We have had to repeat this more than once. See, for example: Rozalskaya M. Illegal anti-extremism in the first half of 2011.

[20] See about this: Alperovich V., Verkhovsky A., Yudina N. Between Manezhnaya and Bolotnaya.

[21] In this area, law enforcement agencies also often take illegal or at least controversial actions, but this is not the subject of this report.

[22] For example, one propagandist of military jihad was convicted, quite rightly, under Art. 280 and 205 ² , that is, for public calls for extremist and terrorist activities.

[23] Verkhovsky A. Is Hizb ut-Tahrir an extremist organization? // SOVA Center. 2005. October 20 ( http://www.sova-center.ru/religion/publications/2005/10/d6036/ ).

[24] This Turkish word simply refers to the followers of the teachings of Nursi. Those really exist in Russia, they have websites, a certain influence in the Muslim environment, but nothing is known about the existence of any single network or organization, as well as about any illegal actions.

[25] True, the most severe sentence, one and a half years in prison, handed down to Asylzhan Kelmukhambetov in Orenburg, was reduced in cassation in January 2012 to a fine (an unprecedented case in this area), and he was released.

[26] At the time of writing, the suspects have not been arrested, and the investigation is ongoing, as is the campaign to protect them.

[27] Convicted Gabdrakhmanov was convicted in 2007 for distributing Hizb ut-Tahrir leaflets, and there are good reasons to believe that they were planted. Earlier, in 2005, Gabdrakhmanov in Bashkortostan was accused of possession of weapons, but the case was closed, and he himself was recognized as the right to rehabilitation.

[28] Khabibullin, the leader of the Russian wing of the pseudo-Sufi sect Nurdzhular, was detained in the Moscow region. Prepared suicide bombers with hypnosis // CentrAsia. 2010. October 18 ( http://www.centrasia.ru/newsA.php?st=1287424140 ).

[29] On January 31, 2012, Gabdrakhmanov and Khabibullin were both sentenced to 4 years in a colony-settlement for possession of ammunition and inciting hatred (Part 1 of Article 222 and Part 1 of Article 282 of the Criminal Code). The verdict was appealed.

[30] See: Olga Sibireva. Problems of implementation of freedom of conscience in Russia in 2011 // SOVA Center. 2012. March 1 ( http://www.sova-center.ru/religion/publications/2012/03/d23788/ ).

[31] The term NRM is used here in a neutral religious sense. Since the term itself has been established for a relatively long time, some NRMs, such as Jehovah's Witnesses and even Scientologists, are not so new anymore.

[32] See: Rozalskaya M. Illegal application of anti-extremist legislation in Russia in 2010.

[33] This slogan was used by the monks of the Athos monastery of Esfigmenou, who did not recognize the transition to the Gregorian calendar and because of this refused to obey the Ecumenical Patriarch. Black flag with the words "Orthodoxy or death!" was raised above the monastery when it was already besieged by the Greek police. In Russia, the slogan was picked up in the early 2000s by a fundamentalist movement against "satanic" barcodes, TINs and other symbols, opposed to the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church. Since many Russian Orthodox fundamentalists are also Russian nationalists, a T-shirt with this slogan was sold along with a T-shirt with the slogan "Russia for Russians!", and a case was started as early as 2010 to ban both.

[34] The decision, which was canceled on formal grounds, was confirmed by the court on 20 December.

[35] Verkhovsky A. Anti-extremist legislation and abuses in its application // SOVA Center. 2008. May 27 ( http://www.sova-center.ru/racism-xenophobia/publications/2008/05/d13425 ).

[36] Lukin was under house arrest for violating the conditional sentence. Previously, he had already been convicted twice - under Art. 214 and Art. 282 ² and 282 ² UK.

[37] Already in February 2012, at the request of the prosecutor's office, the investigation was resumed again.

[38] He himself claimed that he was only defending himself in this fight, but we cannot verify this.

[39] The law provides for several options for the procedure for closing media outlets, with or without warnings, but this variety is almost never used.

[40] Successful on the second attempt; the first attempt was made in 2010.

[41] Surprisingly, this case, closed in May 2011, was reopened on January 19, 2012, and closed again on February 6.

[42] In general, at the time of writing the report on “extremist” articles, but not for violence or anything related to it, there were about 30 people in custody, both rightfully and wrongfully convicted. For more details, see: Verkhovsky A. How to distinguish a prisoner of conscience from an extremist // Vedomosti. March 16, 2012 ( http://www.vedomosti.ru/opinion/news/1538712/kandidaty_v_politzaklyuchennye ); List of imprisoned "extremists" // SOVA Center. 2012. March 16 ( http://www.sova-center.ru/misuse/publications/2012/03/d23900/ ).

Sources

• Verkhovsky Alexander. Illegal anti-extremism-2011 // Polit.ru. 2012. March 28.