“Brake protest”: Detention at public events from January 2013 to April 2014

The OVD-Info submits a report prepared on the basis of detention monitoring at public events in 2013 and the first quarter of 2014 in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Voronezh and other cities. The report gives statistics on the number of detentions at peaceful public events, describing typical violations in the police departments and during trials, and analyzes changes in Russian legislation on freedom of assembly. In 2013, activists ended up in the police department after the nationalist subjects devoted to LGBT rights in support of the defendants in the “swamp business” dedicated to the Sochi Olympics, social and environmental problems. The topic of the struggle for honest elections was replaced by detentions associated with election campaigns. For a long time there were a lot of detentions at the events of Strategy-31. The most large-scale protests in Moscow and St. Petersburg in the first quarter of 2014-against the sentence in the “Swamp case” and the escalation of Russian participation in the conflict in Ukraine. From the statistics of detentions, we can draw conclusions about the scale and topics of protest actions, the reactions of the authorities to them. Read the report