Prison for a word

Director of the SOVA information and analytical center Alexander Verkhovsky on how the number of sentences for “propaganda” is growing.

In various groups of active Russian citizens there is a growing conviction that in Russia there are more and more people who are called prisoners of conscience, political prisoners, victims of political repression, etc. And this is true. But it would be more accurate to say that this is not one truth, but several, and I would like to at least partially understand them.

When we say that there is “repressive legislation” in the country, we primarily mean legislation on countering extremism. And yes, in some of its formulations it is precisely repressive, and in others, let’s say, controversial - and therefore harmful. But until recently, under this legislation, with the exception of people who committed violent crimes, very few people ended up behind bars, and just a few were clearly wrongfully imprisoned. There have always been much more people called political prisoners. I wrote about this in Vedomosti three years ago . Since then the situation has changed a lot, but the proportion has remained approximately the same.

Here it is necessary to bring some clarity regarding the terms. The simplest and most understandable of them is “prisoner of conscience.” The source of the definition - "Amnesty International" - refers to a person deprived of freedom for expressing his beliefs or because of his nationality, religion, etc., if he did not commit a common crime, did not use violence or incite violence, and also did not promote racist or similar discriminatory views.

The concept of “political prisoner” is much more popular. Now their various lists are rapidly multiplying and becoming longer. Alas, there is no longer a common understanding here, and it seems that it is impossible to achieve it. It is not for nothing that Amnesty International stopped using this term. In the most authoritative version for Russia, used by the human rights center Memorial, political prisoners are considered to be those deprived of liberty without guilt or clearly disproportionately to guilt if this happened for political reasons of the authorities. The nature of the activities of the convicted person is not taken into account, which is, in my opinion, the weak point of the definition: in authoritarian regimes, which produce political prisoners, it is often difficult to distinguish between the political and other motives of government officials.

In the definition used by the Human Rights Center “Memorial”, there is another reason for controversy, which has recently become increasingly relevant for us. Those who called for violence or incited national and other similar hatred are excluded. But it is unclear whether this exception should apply only to those actions for which a person was deprived of freedom, or to his other activities. At this point, I myself choose the last option, since otherwise it will turn out that political prisoners will have to consider a person who was not brought to trial a hundred times for calling for a pogrom, but for some reason was brought to trial for a less dangerous statement. Based on the experience of monitoring our stupid anti-extremist law enforcement, this does not happen so rarely.

From the data of the SOVA Center on sentences for “crimes of an extremist nature” (this is the official term), we can distinguish a category of people deprived of liberty for actions of a non-violent and not ordinary criminal nature, but for various kinds of statements or participation in certain groups as such. Today, 15 articles in our Criminal Code are suitable to one degree or another for this purpose. From time to time we publish a register of such people currently serving time.Last time - September 21 .

The register has grown sharply this year, and for some articles of the Criminal Code - noticeably faster than for others. Thus, eight people are imprisoned for calling for terrorism or justifying it, 11 people are already imprisoned under the new article on participation in a prohibited terrorist organization (the organization is meant to be the same - Hizb ut-Tahrir), for participation in an extremist organization (most often the same) - 26, for calls for extremist activity - 11, and according to the most famous article. 282, i.e. for inciting racial, religious and other hatred – 25. Of the 15 “non-violent extremist” articles of the Criminal Code, for some no one is imprisoned, and for others - one or two people. For example, one roofer, Vladimir Podrezov, is in prison for hooliganism and vandalism motivated by political hatred, namely on charges of complicity in painting a star on a high-rise building. So far we have only one convicted under a relatively new article on calls for separatism - Rafis Kashapov, a moderate Tatar nationalist, imprisoned for three years for statements regarding Crimea. In total, there are 54 people on our list (many have more than one article in their sentence). In January of this year there were 29 of them, and by the time the previous article was written on the same topic in 2012 there were 33.

Usually these convicts are not random people, but rather radical nationalists and Islamists. Although there are truly random ones: resident of Staraya Russa Anton Izokaitis was sentenced to 2.5 years for swearing at the police station, where he was taken on January 1 of this year; He was charged with justifying terrorism and inciting hatred.

26 people are in prison for “propaganda” in its purest form. Most of them, as far as we know (and we don’t always know), the incriminated statements included obvious calls for violence. But before, people were imprisoned much less often for such calls. In January of this year, there were 14 prisoners of this type. The sharp increase was largely achieved thanks to a completely new trend - adding sentences under these articles to prisoners previously convicted of ordinary crimes. It is not clear what exactly we are seeing here – a new trend among prisoners or among law enforcement officers. But even if we exclude this factor, we can definitely say that people are being imprisoned “for words” more often. Although the share of those sentenced specifically to imprisonment has not increased much: after all, the total number of sentences for “propaganda” is growing very quickly, it’s just that the sentences in 90% of cases are lighter.

30 people are imprisoned for participation in banned organizations, which, again, is more than in January. This is mainly Hizb ut-Tahrir, although there are also three ultra-rightists, as well as two followers of the Sufi teacher Said Nursi - Bagir Kazikhanov and Alexander Melentyev. The far right has indeed been involved in some pretty dangerous groups, Hizb ut-Tahrir is an undeniably radical Islamist party, but not involved in any way in violent activities. But Nursi’s followers are completely peaceful people, but they are classified as a member of the banned organization “Nurcular”, the very existence of which in Russia is doubtful.

How do all these 54 people relate to the concepts of “prisoner of conscience” and “political prisoner”? For the most part, no way, because these people, due to the aggressive nature of their propaganda (personal or their organizations), do not comply with the above-mentioned restrictions established for the lists of Amnesty International and the Human Rights Center Memorial. On the other hand, it is possible to get on these lists without using anti-extremist articles of the Criminal Code, and this is what happens most often.

Among people convicted specifically under anti-extremist articles, the SOVA center tries to single out those convicted unlawfully. We consider two categories of sentences to be unlawful. The first is if the sentence was pronounced in clear violation of the current law; Usually we are talking about an expansive interpretation. The second is if the rule of law used itself seems to us to be clearly contrary to the guarantees of freedom of expression in our Constitution (for example, the idea that the assertion of religious superiority is extremism). There are also many cases where the sentence cannot be considered unlawful, but can be considered disproportionately severe (or in general the statement, speaking seriously, did not deserve a criminal investigation), but we still do not classify such sentences as unlawful. There are, of course, cases where the circumstances are sufficiently unknown to us to judge the legality of the sentence.

Wrongful convictions make up a small part of the total number of anti-extremist ones. And people are still rarely sentenced to imprisonment under “propaganda” charges. From the beginning of the Ukrainian events until August of this year, we counted 42 people wrongfully convicted . But fortunately, there are much fewer people wrongfully imprisoned for “extremism.” Today, in our opinion, there are five of them.

For comparison: according to Memorial Human Rights Center, there are 40 people on the list of currently imprisoned political prisoners . Each of these 40 cases can be the subject of debate, like each of our five, but in general this indicates the place of anti-extremist legislation in the repressive mechanism of the state. This place is relatively modest, but, as we see, it is gradually becoming less and less modest. We can already name several people who have been charged with serious and, in our opinion, unlawful anti-extremist charges, for example, “separatist” Daria Polyudova.

The status of “prisoner of conscience” can only be authoritatively assigned by Amnesty International. Which, as in the case of the status of a political prisoner, does not prevent other groups, especially politically engaged ones, from distributing these statuses at their own discretion. This is very clear in the case of our neo-Nazis who call serial racist killers prisoners of conscience; those who consider them “prisoners of war” in a “race war” are more honest. And yet, I will try to look at the illegally imprisoned “extremists” through the prism of the definition of a prisoner of conscience. Perhaps the four currently sitting - the already mentioned Vladimir Podrezov, Rafis Kashapov, Bagir Kazikhanov and Alexander Melentyev - fully correspond to this status. The other day, Amnesty already recognized Kashapov as such.

Until recently, anti-extremist law enforcement was gradually expanding, and our main complaint against it was in 2011–2913. There was an ever-increasing bias from the prosecution of real ideologically motivated violence to the prosecution of public xenophobic statements, and a significant proportion of the latter were not worth the police efforts simply because of their insignificance. In other words, the main flaw of law enforcement was the gradual abandonment of real tasks in favor of replenishing statistics through the chaotic and petty prosecution of some Internet racists. This vice has continued to worsen over the past two years, but in itself it at least has not increased the number of wrongful sentences, especially those involving imprisonment. However, since last year the number of such cases has increased noticeably, and this year we are also seeing a sharp increase in the number of people actually imprisoned for non-violent crimes. And taken together, these two trends are already causing serious concern.

Sources

• Verkhovsky A. Prison for the word // Vedomosti. 2015. September 22.