The Orenburg Regional Court held the first hearing to review the case on the ban of 68 religious works

In Orenburg, the regional court began revising the case on recognizing 68 materials as extremist.

On February 26, 2015, the Orenburg Regional Court began considering appeals against the decision of the Leninsky District Court of Orenburg to ban 68 Islamic religious materials.

Appeals are currently pending for twenty books, representatives of publishers participate in the process as an interested party "New World" and "Dilya" and two authors - Fethullah Gülen and Shamil Alyautdinov.

Appeals are complicated by the fact that all recognized as extremist materials by decision of the Leninsky District Court Orenburg were destroyed. The prosecutor's office provided the court with similar ones, but the adequacy of the replacement raises legitimate doubts.

Interested party lawyers refer to the conclusion Research Institute of Forensic Science (NII SE) in relation to a number of books, which did not reveal signs of extremism in this literature, but revealed serious errors in the conclusions of two experts (teacher of the Russian State Humanitarian University Svetlana Yakovleva and lecturer Moscow Orthodox Theological Academy Yuri Maksimov), which relied in the decision of the Leninsky District Court. Recall that the court ordered an examination four specialists, two of whom saw signs in all books extremism, the third did not find any in any of them and stated that the religious literature "requires a separate approach, since it has its own specifics", and the fourth refused to participate in the analysis.

Note that lawyers discovered that one of the banned books, Stories of the Prophets from Adam to Muhammad", did not pass the forensic examination at all.

Recall that the Leninsky District Court made a scandalous decision on the banning of 68 materials at once in March 2012 in fifteen minutes, in the absence of representatives interested persons and organizations, so that the decision of the court became known only in June of the same year. Among the prohibited materials were very authoritative religious writings, and the decision of the court caused a strong protest Muslim community, a special statement was issued by the Council of Muftis of Russia. As a result, the decision was challenged, but the regional court did not proceed to consideration of the case for two years, during which the persecution continued believers for distributing banned literature.

We are convinced of the illegality of the decision of the Lenin Court Orenburg, which, from our point of view, is one of the most unsightly pages in the history of abuses of anti-extremist legislation in Russia, and we hope for its abolition. For more information on our position, please see here .

Sources

• A resonant case on extremist literature is being considered in Orenburg // RIA "Orenburg". 2015. February 26.