144. Take the camera

A criminal casewas opened against the head of the election headquarters of the democratic coalition in Novosibirsk Leonid Volkov under part 3 of Article 144 of the Criminal Code (obstruction of the legal professional activity of journalists by damage to property). According to investigators, on July 17, the filming group of the Lifenews television channel appeared at the headquarters of the Democratic Republic, where Volkov allegedly grabbed the microphone of the publication employee Alexander Prezensky and broke it. The damage was estimated at 32 thousand 142 rubles 83 kopecks. The case was opened on the application of Prezansky.

“That is, a dude from Lifehnus wrote a denunciation on me that I had broken a microphone (did not break) to him, there was already an interrogation in the police, and now in the UK,” commented on the initiation of the work of wolves on his twitter. Now he is in the status of a suspect in the case.

Journalists in Russia regularly face the fact that private and state persons impede their work by force, however, criminal cases are very rare after that, these cases reach court even less often. According to the statistics of the Judicial Department at the Supreme Court, from 2009 to 2014 in Russia, under Article 144 of the Criminal Code, only five people were convicted. Last year, one convicted person under this article was sentenced to a conditional time, and the other was amnestied. In 2009, two people received a fine, another thing was closed by reconciliation of the parties.

In the fall of 2014, such a criminal case was instituted against a resident of the village of Chigiri in the Amur Region, who, according to investigators, inflicted the beatings of two local journalists who came to take off the plot of a shelter for stray dogs. In January 2015, the case was opened on the fact of an attack on the chief editor of the Irkutsk portal Babr.ru Dmitry Taevsky, who left the editorial office of the journalist, fired from the traumatic “Osa”. In May of that year, the court in the Chelyabinsk region began to consider the case of attack on the journalist of U74.ru Andrei Danilov, who made the plot about the meeting of residents of the apartment building.

On Yamal, a week ago, the case was opened after the beating of the journalists of the television reality show “Revizorro”, in which the host of the program Elena Flying reviews Russian bars, hotels and cafes-in the Salekhard cafe “Victoria”, journalists beat and broke the camera.

In 2015, the Investigative Committee twice initiated criminal cases under the article 144 in connection with the events in Ukraine. In February, the case was instituted on the detention of NTV correspondent Andrei Grigoryev and the Channel One reporter Elena Makarova, who prepared the material about the march in Kiev of the Right Sector - an organization banned in Russia. Both journalists were deported to Russia. Another thing was associated with the deportation of a special correspondent of Channel One by Alexandra Cherepnina from Kyiv. Vladimir Markin called its expulsion from Ukraine, the press secretary of the department called "Bandera sterilization of journalism." According to him, the Ukrainian authorities with impunity use violence against “defenseless and unarmed journalists”, but sooner or later they will “have to answer” for crimes against media representatives.

At the same time, investigators refused to qualify under the 144th article a criminal case on the attack on the correspondent of Echo of Moscow in St. Petersburg Arseniy Vesnin, who covered the action of anti-war activists and received a traumatic brain injury after the attack of an activist of NODs. The investigation also did not associate the beating of an employee of the Pskov Province Provinius publication Lev Schlosberg. It was not possible to achieve the retraining of the case under Article 144 of the Criminal Code and the chief editor of the Buryat newspaper Arshan Arkady Zarubin, who was beaten by an employee of the district administration in the election commission.

In December 2011, the journalist of the Kommersant newspaper Alexander Chernykh was beaten by police at one of the protest rallies held in Moscow after the State Duma elections. Despite the reporting certificate he had, the Chernykhs, along with the detained activists, were taken to a car Zakak, where an employee OMON began to beat the journalist while his colleague held blacks by the shoulders.

“When I was there, he (a policeman - MZ) threw me on the floor, stood at me with his feet, began to jump on me. It was, in general, very painful. After some time, it stopped, he got out of there, other police officers went, the car drove, ”Blacks said after the incident. Avtozak drove about 500 meters, after which the police fired a journalist from the bus.

Several years have passed since the incident, but the case against the beaten journalist of the police was never opened.

“I constantly went to interrogations, they were transferring the case from the Ministry of Internal Affairs to the UK and back, and as a result nothing. It’s just that every new investigator called me, asked the same questions, and that’s it, ”says Chernykh.

The appeal of the Novye Gazeta journalist Evgeny Feldman to law enforcement agencies in 2012 also did not give a result. According to Feldman, then he suffered while trying to expose the election falsification - the collection of fake signatures for the nomination of the Governor of the Irkutsk Region Dmitry Mezentsev in the President of Russia. When trying to catch up with falsifiers, several people of “strong physique” hit the journalist several times in the face.

“We called the police, I wrote a statement, two or three times for a year and a half I was called for interrogation. They did not initiate a matter of lack of damage, it seems. But it was evident that the trackers were indifferent, ”the journalist said. He wrote another statement to law enforcement agencies in August 2012, after the employees of the ChoP “Bell” beat the reporters of the Pussy Riot to the Pussy Riot in support of Pussy Riot. Six months after the incident, the prosecutor's office refused to institute criminal proceedings under Article 144 of the Criminal Code.

The problems of application of these articles are due to the fact that it is initially unsuccessful, said lawyer Damir Gainutdinov. “There is a criminal exclusively the obstruction of the activities of journalists, associated with the coercion to refuse to disseminate information - or, a recovery, to the dissemination of information. This wording allows law enforcement officers, if desired, it is easy to refuse to merge the case, citing the fact that it is impossible to prove the fact of coercion to refuse to disseminate information, ”the lawyer explains.

“The dissemination of information is the final stage, at first it is a collection, search, and so on,” says Gainutdinov. Due to the fact that the article is criminalized only by obstruction of distribution, it is difficult to attract those who directly prevent journalists from collecting material. In 2011, the article was supplemented by part 3, which included the use of violence to a journalist and damage to property. According to Gainutdinov, even some initiated things hardly fit into the wording of the article. He cites a criminal case as an example, where the accident participants pulled out the hair journalists and were convicted: “I read this sentence, and there is also no justification that these actions were forced by journalists to refuse to disseminate information.”

“We see that practice, albeit so scarce, is following the path that you can tighten a fairly wide range of actions under this composition. This article is so poorly formulated that it allows you to initiate the case, and when it is not necessary to refuse, ”the lawyer concludes.