The SOVA Center presented a report on unlawful anti-extremism in 2013

On April 29, 2014, the presentation of the report "Illegal application of anti-extremist legislation in Russia in 2013" was held at the Independent Press Center.

The audience was addressed by the director of the SOVA Center Alexander Verkhovsky, the author of the report Maria Kravchenko, and the editor-in-chief of the Agentura.ru website Andrey Soldatov.

Alexander Verkhovsky and Maria Kravchenko spoke about the situation with unlawful persecution under "anti-extremist" articles observed in 2013. The past year in Russia as a whole was characterized by a certain decline in political activity, although fears of a new upsurge of an opposition movement of one kind or another clearly continued to persist in the authorities. This was reflected in the trends in the development of both legislation and law enforcement in the area that is designated in Russia as "countering extremism."

The fears of the federal authorities resulted in a very active legislative activity in 2013. Some existing norms have been tightened and new repressive mechanisms have been created. In some cases, the particularly repressive intentions of the legislators even had to be corrected, either in the process of passing laws, or already through amendments. Some measures seem simply far-fetched, others are implicitly targeted at specific groups. But there are also measures that apply to everyone - first of all, this is a sharp expansion of the possibilities for blocking access to resources on the Internet.

All this together creates fears of a serious increase in the scale of repressive law enforcement in the coming year 2014, especially given the aggravation of the foreign policy situation and the acute controversy surrounding it within the country.

Anti-extremist law enforcement as a whole is shifting into the virtual realm. And the fact that the Internet user environment has a great potential for resistance to such policies is likely to be fraught with new repressive norms and activities.

Andrei Soldatov described the picture that emerged after the adoption of laws related to the regulation of the Internet, gave examples from current practice and predicted a further deterioration in the situation.

The text of the report is available on the Polit.ru website and on our website .

Sources

• Inc. inf.