Misuse of Anti-Extremism in March 2015

The following is our review of the primary and most representative events in the misuse of Russia’s anti-extremist legislation in March 2015.

Lawmaking

In early March, the Constitutional Court published a ruling, issued in February regarding its refusal to consider the complaint filed by Sergei Alekhin. Alekhin was trying to challenge two questionable provisions of the law “On Combating Extremist Activity” at once – the notion that propaganda of superiority of one’s own religion over all the others constitutes extremist activity, and a ban on any demonstration of symbols similar to Nazi symbols, regardless of their context. His appeal to Constitutional Court was based on the fact that the Krasnodar Regional Court recognized materials of Chinese spiritual movement Falun Gong as extremist in 2011. The emblem of the movement contains a four-sided swastika - a traditional oriental character. The Constitutional Court indicated that the provision related to superiority does not infringe the freedom of thought and expression when used correctly; meanwhile, the symbols similar to Nazi ones, “regardless of their genesis,” “may cause distress” to relatives of those killed during the war. The Constitutional Court gave no further reasoning on this case.

The Kaliningrad Regional Duma submitted to the State Duma a bill aimed at tightening the Administrative Code Article 20.3, which, incidentally, punishes for promotion and display of Nazi or extremist paraphernalia or symbols. A dramatic increase of fines (from 10 to 20 thousand rubles for individuals, from 15 to 30 thousand for officials, from 50 to 100 thousand for legal entities) is suggested for offenses under Part 1 of this article. Penalties for acts covered under Part 2 can range from 30 to 50 thousand rubles for individuals, 50-100 thousand for officials, and 250 - 500 thousand for legal entities. The proposal also introduces administrative penalties for repeated offenses of this kind - a fine of 50 to 100 thousand rubles for individuals, 100 - 300 thousand for officials, and from 500 thousand and up to one million rubles for legal entities.

In late March, Alexander Remezkov, the Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Committee on Civil, Criminal, Arbitration and Procedural Legislation, submitted to the Duma a draft bill on criminal liability for legal persons. The bill stipulates a wide range of penalties – a warning, loss of privileges or licenses, fines, withdrawn permissions for activities, a ban on activity on the territory of the Russian Federation, or a complete liquidation. In particular, a liquidation or a ban on activity apply to organizations recognized as extremist or terrorist. Such organizations already have to be liquidated in accordance with the existing legislation. However, the liquidation may also follow if an organization was involved in an offense under the Criminal Code Articles 205.2, 208, 212, 278, 280, 282 (new Articles 280.1 and 354.1, apparently, were simply overlooked by the draft’s author). All these cases, except for Article 280, provide for an opportunity to preserve an organization which can as well be punished with large fines, a temporary ban on activities, or loss of privileges. Notably, for a legal entity not just organization or execution of a crime as directed by leaders of an organization, but any complicity in a crime will be treated as a crime committed by the entity, including even connivance, “contributing to the commission or concealment of a crime, inter alia, by providing advisory services.” Considering current legal practices, these measures have a large abuse potential, so the high likelihood of approval for this bill becomes a cause for concern.

Criminal Prosecution

In early March the Taganrog City Court started a retrial of the “Case of the 16”, in which 16 Jehovah's Witnesses had been convicted under the Criminal Code Article 282.2 parts 1 and 2 (organizing the activities of an organization banned for extremism and participation in it) merely for continuing activities of the Taganrog Jehovah's Witnesses community. All defendants pleaded not guilty. The court offered to drop charges under Article 282.2 for some of the defendants due to the statute of limitation, but they refused to have the case dismissed on non-rehabilitating grounds, insisting on acquittal.

In mid-March, three activists - Michael Feldman, Oleg Savvin and Dmitry Fonarev - went on trial in Kaliningrad for hanging a German flag on a garage of the Kaliningrad Regional FSB Office in March 2014. They were charged under the Criminal Code Article 213 Part 2 (hooliganism committed by a group of persons by prior agreement, motivated by political hatred and enmity, and motivated by hatred against the social group “government representatives.”) According to the original version provided by the investigation, the offenders displayed a flag of Germany on March 11, 2014 “as a symbol of the need for the Kaliningrad Region to separate from Russia and join the European Union, which grossly violated public order.” In the course of the court proceedings, the action was also presented as an “insult to veterans of the Great Patriotic War.” We would like to remind that, according to the Supreme Court clarification with respect to the practice of anti-extremist legislation, criticism of political figures (including government representatives) should not be construed as incitement to hatred and prosecuted under Article 282; this consideration should be applicable in the current case. Moreover, qualification of an act of displaying a flag as a criminal offense is seriously problematic.

At the same time, it became known that an associate of the accused activists in the Committee of Public Self-defense (KOS), Kaliningrad resident Dmitry Irkitov is a suspect under the Criminal Code Article 280. Irkitov is suspected of disseminating calls for changing the constitutional order of the Russian Federation via social networks. The details are not yet known. Law enforcement agencies summoned the activist for an interview, and then conducted a search and seized a computer. In the fall of 2014, Irkitov participated in the Peace March, for which KOS served as the Kaliningrad regional organizer, and later was severely beaten, as were several other organizers of the march. He is currently in the hospital after deterioration in his condition.

Late in the month left activist Darya Polyudova from Krasnodar filed an appeal with the European Court of Human Rights. She has appealed the criminal prosecution against her (as disproportionate and needlessly cruel), and her six-month-long incarceration. In March, it became known that Polyudova has not been accused of an attempt to organize a march for the federalization of Kuban; instead, she has been charged under the Criminal Code Articles 280 (public incitement to extremist activity) and 280.1 (public incitement to action aimed at violating the territorial integrity of the Russian Federation) on the basis of several social network publications. Based on our preliminary data, these posts contain no dangerous appeals deserving of criminal prosecution.

In March, the Memorial Human Rights Center recognized another Kuban opposition activist, Sergei Titarenko, as a political prisoner; he was arrested in Krasnodar in September 2014 as a suspect under the Criminal Code Article 280 and released on terms of remaining at his approved address in March, after six months of jail. Previously, it was assumed that he was charged as Polyudova’s “accomplice” in the case of the march for the federalization of Kuban. However, as it turned out, he was not involved in the organization of the march; he was charged for re-posting on the social networks the text, published in the form of news report about Boris Filatov, the Deputy Chairman of Dnipropetrovsk Regional State Administration, allegedly offering a reward for the elimination of the Russian president. Titarenko re-posted this text with no evaluative comments, so, in this case, it would be wrong to interpret online sharing as a call to action. It is known that many readers mistook this text for an actual news item, so that Filatov even found it necessary to refute it. In our opinion, the police would have been well justified in ordering the users of social networks to remove the inflammatory disinformation, but criminal prosecution would be appropriate against an author, and not against his/her deceived readers.

An inmate of a penal colony in Nizhny Tagil was convicted under Article 282 (incitement to hatred and enmity), for speaking up in the education room. According to the investigation, “the accused, in the presence of other prisoners, uttered a number of offensive remarks aimed at inciting hatred towards certain social and religious groups,” “spoke on religious subjects in rude manner” and asserted the superiority of one religion over another. The court sentenced the inmate to an imprisonment for a term of 1 year and 7 months in a maximum security penal colony, with the remaining part of his previous sentence taken into account. In our view, the verdict against the inmate under Article 282 was inappropriate, since his insulting remarks weren’t made in public. The suspect spoke in a room and was addressing a small group. In addition, we advocate excluding the clauses on superiority of one religion over others and inciting hatred against social groups from the legislation on anti-extremist propaganda.

In late March 2015, criminal proceedings under Article 282 Part 1 (incitement of hatred or enmity, and humiliation of human dignity) in Murmansk against Alexander Serebryanikov, the owner of the Bloger51 website, were dropped due to the statute of limitation. The case against him was filed in 2013 based on his publication of a material containing “statements inciting enmity against a group of people on the basis of their religion.” Serebryanikov argued that the nationalistic paragraph appeared in one of the texts after the site had been hacked, and, upon discovering the breach, the editor promptly removed the foreign text and archived the posting. The media speculates that other publications on Serebryanikov’s website, which often featured criticism against the regional and municipal authorities, were the true reason for the prosecution against him.

Administrative Prosecution

According to our data, eight people and one legal entity were inappropriately charged under the Administrative Code Article 20.29 for mass dissemination of extremist materials or possession with intent to distribute. This number includes five religious believers (evidently Muslims) from the village of Khalitovo in the Chelyabinsk Region charged for exchanging banned religious literature; the Tyumen Jehovah's Witnesses congregation charged for distributing extremist brochures among its members; an acting court bailiff from Nadym, charged for sharing, in 2011, the video Let’s Remind Crooks and Thieves about Their 2002 Manifesto, produced by Alexei Navalny’s supporters; the deputy director of the Scientific Library of the Izhevsk State Technical University, where several extremist books had been found; an antifascist from Saratov charged for posting a passage from an anti-Semitic book by V.Gladky on a social network.

Two people were fined in March under the Administrative Code Article 20.3 for promotion and display of Nazi symbols in non-ideological context. A journalist from Smolensk imprudently posted on a social network a photograph of her own courtyard, taken during the times of German occupation. A Nazi flag and a group of soldiers were visible on the image she took from a historical photographs website. A social activist from Buryatia was prosecuted for reposting the “Grammar-Nazi” symbol - the eagle, resembling the Nazi eagle, holding a swastika in its claws, with the inscription “Grammatik Macht Frei.” In addition, ten people were arrested on the march in memory of Boris Nemtsov in Moscow and fined under Article 20.3 for carrying the flags decorated with the Celtic cross - a common symbol among the ultra-right, but not a Nazi symbol or a symbol of an organization banned for extremism, which are covered under this Criminal Code article. Apparently, these ten people also included some individuals, who simply happened to be seen near a flag.

Six legal entities were prosecuted for imperfect content filters (which, even in theory, are unable to weed out all forbidden content) under the Administrative Code Article 6.17 (violation of the legislation of the RF on protecting children from information harmful to their health and/or development) - five café owners in Novosibirsk and the Central Library System of Beryozovsky, a town in the Sverdlovsk Region.

Banning Organizations and Materials and Other State Actions

In early March, the Krasnodar Regional Court recognized a local religious organization of Jehovah's Witnesses in Abinsk as extremist and decided to eliminate it. The community was recognized as extremist based on the fact that one of its members had been brought to administrative responsibility for distribution of several brochures included on the Federal List of Extremist Materials. The organization received a warning about the impermissibility of extremist activity, but the community members continued to distribute religious literature. The defense of the Jehovah's Witnesses intends to appeal to the Supreme Court, believing that the court's decision was unlawful and unreasonable, and violates the constitutional rights of believers. This is the third case known to us of a local Jehovah's Witnesses organization being banned as extremist (and the fourth attempt at such a ban).

In the second half of March, the Supreme Court of the Republic of Adygea approved the December decision by the Maikop City Court, which recognized as extremist the article “Silence of the Lambs” by local ecologist Valery Brinikh published on the website For Krasnodar about environmental pollution from the local pig farming complex. The Prosecutor's Office found that the author of the article was “fueling ethnic hatred and inciting enmity” and “calling for extremist activity.” However, we found no dangerous incitement in the article. Obviously, the local authorities used Brinikh’s article as an excuse to pressure the activist and independent For Krasnodar website, because the pig farm discussed in the article belonged to Vyacheslav Derev, a member of the RF Federation Council. Now that the ban against the material was upheld, evidently, the criminal proceedings against Brinikh for the fact of its publication will be opened under Article 282.

Late in the month, Roskomnadzor issued a warning to Novosibirsk online resource Sib.fm. The charges were based on an illustration to the article “Siberian Social Activists Oppose the Orthodox Church Monopoly on Morality and Spirituality.” The collage depicted Christ, Pushkin and Putin having a drink together. Roskomnadzor said this image offends “religious feelings of the Christians” and referred to the law on combating extremist activity, which prohibits dissemination of banned materials through mass media though this image has never been banned. The existence of legal provisions that protect the feelings of believers - and thus enter the area of subjective perceptions - inevitably leads to oddities.