Translated material
Roskomnadzor demanded that the SOVA Center remove a reference guide about the ultra-right and their symbols from the pages of the site
The SOVA Center, in order to avoid blocking, was forced to remove from the pages of its website the Russian adaptation of the book by the Swedish researcher Håkan Gestrin "Extreme Right and Their Symbols".
Recently, on March 15, 2016, the SOVA Center received two letters from Roskomnadzor. They told us that two pages of our site contained illegal information and should be removed or the site would be blocked. We lawfully did what Roskomnadzor demanded and notified it about it, but now we would like to share our doubts in this regard.
It was about two pages of a small reference manual, which was made back in 2008 within the framework of the joint project "Owls" and the Swedish anti-fascist research center and the EXPO magazine. For those who are not aware of the history of Swedish anti-fascism, let's say that one of the founders of the publication was Stieg Larrson, well known for his detective trilogy, but it's better to read about "EXPO" even here .
The manual was a Russian adaptation of the book by the Swedish researcher Håkan Gestrin "The Far Right and Their Symbols", published in Stockholm in the fall of 2007, supplemented by a chapter on the symbols of Russian right-wing radicals. Like many manuals similar to it in other countries, it was addressed primarily to teachers, police officers and other people who are faced with far-right manifestations, primarily among young people, and who need some factual knowledge about this unpleasant subject, in including the symbols used.
At first, we distributed the manual on CD, and a few years later, when the original project website http://www.symbolsofhate.com stopped working, we posted it on our website (at http://www.sova-center.ru/sh) . Over the years, different people, from teachers to experts, have thanked us for our work.
But at the end of last year, the prosecutors of the Kirov region drew attention to our manual in a different sense: they found in it something illegal, literally - "information, the distribution of which is prohibited in the Russian Federation." As a result, on October 26, 2015, the Leninsky District Court of Kirov, and on December 16, the Kumensky District Court of the Kirov Region each recognized one (out of a total of ten) page of the allowance. The SOVA Center was not notified about these trials either before or after them, so for the first time we heard about them on March 15, 2016 from Roskomnadzor. Unfortunately, it is impossible to understand from the standardized reports of Roskomnadzor what kind of violations of the law these two courts saw.
We invite you to make up your own mind about this, since the manual is still available - on the website of the well-known Dutch organization Magenta , which has long been fighting against racism and discrimination, especially on the Internet.
We can only assume that the matter is, in fact, in the subject to which the manual is devoted - in the symbols of the ultra-right. Among the symbols cited in the manual, there are many that relate to Nazi symbols, starting with the swastika, or to the symbols of organizations already banned in Russia for extremism. "Propaganda and public demonstration" of such symbols is prohibited by the law "On countering extremist activity."
Thus, prosecutors and judges in the Kirov region could even come to the conclusion that our manual is extremist material, but still they did not go that far and limited themselves to the decision on the illegality of its individual pages.
If our hypothesis about the reasons for these two court decisions is correct, then we are once again faced with a stubborn unwillingness to take into account the context of the use of a particular symbolism. Considering the context is generally a weak point of Russian anti-extremist law enforcement. It was not difficult to see what the SOVA Center is doing, what is generally published on our website, and to understand that it is difficult to reproach us for the propaganda of Nazism and related ideas. Well, about as difficult as Soviet war films, where you can also regularly see the swastika.
However, we removed the tutorial and now have to limit ourselves to the link above to the Magenta site, because we did not want our site to be blocked. Perhaps we would be able to challenge such a blocking in court, but hardly quickly.
This story again draws attention to the extremely unfortunate language in the legislation regarding prohibited symbols. First of all, Art. 20.3 of the Code of Administrative Offenses, which considers “propaganda OR public demonstration” of all extremist symbols (whatever that means), that is, demonstration without the purpose of propaganda, and even with the opposite purpose, should be considered an offense. And although the consistent application of such a norm is simply impossible, if only because of the same films, there are already quite a few cases of persecution “for the swastika” of those who were extremely far from propaganda of Nazi ideas. To quote our recent report : “In 2015, we noted 39 cases of sanctions for displaying Nazi or extremist symbols that were clearly not aimed at dangerous propaganda, which is about five times more than a year earlier.”
The solution to the problem would be simply to replace the phrase "propaganda or public demonstration" in part 1 of the article with the phrase "public demonstration for propaganda purposes", by analogy with part 2 of the same article. And a similar amendment should be made to Art. 1 of the law "On counteracting extremist activity".
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