Commentary on the bill on clarifying the signs of extremist activity

On January 22, 2014, the State Duma of the Russian Federation was submitted draft law No. 434186-6 "On Amendments to Certain Legislative acts of the Russian Federation on the issue of clarifying the signs of extremist activities", which proposes a new definition of extremist activities, the wording of several "extremist" articles of the Criminal Code and criminalizes a number of administrative acts.

The main idea of ​​the bill is to reduce the definition extremist activity to the list of certain criminally punishable actions - seems to us absolutely correct. Anti-extremist legislation generally involves more stringent mechanisms for responding to activities organizations, the media and individuals than other offenses, and if so, it is reasonable to assume that only more dangerous acts, which should not be classified as petty administrative offenses.

The list of articles of the Criminal Code proposed in the draft law, which determines the essence of extremist activity, of course, causes a lot of issues, but this part of the bill can - and should - be amended in second reading.

On the other hand, we consider the amendments to the Criminal Code, which proposed by the deputies Zhuravlev and Zhigarev.

They believe that the wording they propose for Art. 282 The Criminal Code will reduce arbitrariness in its application. But we do not see what the proposed wording - "Propaganda of exclusivity, superiority or inferiority, as well as actions, including statements, justifying or asserting the need to commit crimes under the Special Part of this Code" - in this sense it is better than the current one - "Actions, aimed at inciting hatred or enmity, as well as to humiliate dignity". Rather, the proposed wording is fraught with even greater abuse: it is copied from the current definition of extremist activities, and it is this paragraph that has repeatedly led to abuses, for example, as regards the "assertion of superiority" in connection with religious differences, which in itself is inherent in very many religious texts.

It is impossible to make the wording of Art. 282 fully protected from arbitrariness in law enforcement. Therefore, we are in favor of narrowing the composition articles. At the very least, the concept of "social group" should be removed from it as which does not have any generally accepted definition, but such an act as “humiliation dignity" (or, as in the project, the assertion of superiority, inferiority and etc.) to be transferred from the Criminal Code to the sphere of civil law disputes.

We have repeatedly argued that The federal list of extremist materials is completely unusable tool (it is not in vain that it is not available in any European country), and it should be just abolished. Moreover, there can be no question of criminalization dissemination of listed materials, if only because no the citizen is unable to consult the huge and unreadable Federal List.

This does not mean that the cataloging of inflammatory materials does not make sense at all, just its mechanism must be completely others. Of course, some materials can contribute, for example, inciting hatred within the meaning of Art. 282 of the Criminal Code. This fact can be established in criminal process, and information about it for the convenience of law enforcement organs can be stored in some list and used in some other process in the future, when someone is accused of inciting hatred with using the same material. But in itself, the dissemination of material without evidence of the illegal purpose of this action cannot be considered breaking the law.

The same, in fact, applies to the demonstration of the Nazi and the similar symbolism. To criminalize such actions is clearly excessive. Exclude the concept of symbolism, "confusingly similar" means to free from responsibility of a person only for the fact that he drew the swastika crookedly. WITH on the other hand, some characters, of course, can be used perfectly in a different sense and context, up to anti-fascist.

Despite some vagueness in the wording the current article of the Code of Administrative Offenses is a proportional punishment for such an action, which is not so dangerous in itself as to be considered a criminal crime. To eliminate the misunderstandings that the authors have in mind bill, and many others about which we have repeatedly written, it is enough stipulate in Art. 20.3 of the Code of Administrative Offenses, that the demonstration of symbols is illegal if produced for the purpose of propagating the corresponding ideology.