The Kamchatka court rehabilitated Donald Duck

In Kamchatka, the decision to recognize Walt Disney's anti-fascist cartoon as extremist has been canceled.

On July 18, 2016, the Kamchatka Regional Court announced that on July 6, its presidium made a positive decision on the cassation submission and. O. Regional Prosecutor on the review of the verdict of the Petropavlovsk-Kamchatka City Court dated December 23, 2010 regarding the recognition of the anti-fascist cartoon about Donald Duck as extremist material.

The cartoon "Der Fuehrer's Face" ("Fuhrer's Face"), filmed in 1942 as part of the American anti-Hitler propaganda campaign, entitled "Donald Duck and Fascism (forbidden series).avi" was included in the Federal List of Extremist Materials along with a hundred videos (in mostly racist), which were uploaded to his page on the social network "VKontakte" by a resident of Kamchatka, Stanislav Semenov. For distribution of these materials, he was sentenced to six months' imprisonment under Art. 282 of the Criminal Code (inciting hatred or enmity). In September 2015, we reported that for posting this cartoon on the social network under Art. On 20.29 of the Code of Administrative Offenses, two residents of the Tomsk region were fined.

The prosecutor's office of the Kamchatka Territory filed an appeal to change Semenov's sentence, stating that the banned video is a classic Walt Disney cartoon that does not contain calls for extremism or propaganda of fascism, and the ideology of fascism is shown in a caricature form. In addition, the prosecutor's office noted that the ban on the cartoon infringes on the right of an indefinite circle of people to view it.

The court agreed with the arguments of the prosecutor's office, noting that in a comprehensive sociological and psycholinguistic examination, on the results of which the decision of 2010 was based, it was noted that the contents of the file "Donald Duck and Fascism" could not be characterized from a sociological point of view, since the file was not opened for viewing , and also established " the absence or difficulty in establishing language elements expressing negative assessments, negative attitudes that encourage actions directed against someone ."

As a result, the presidium of the Kamchatka Regional Court decided to exclude from the operative part of the verdict the decision to recognize the cartoon about Donald Duck as extremist. The rest of the sentence was left unchanged.

We welcome the decision of the Kamchatka Regional Court, but we must note that the incident of the cartoon about Donald Duck is far from the only example of unlawful recognition of materials as extremist. Moreover, the same verdict of the Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky City Court banned another video of harmless content - a clip about the battle of buyers for cheap potatoes . It is obvious that its content was also not properly examined by the court. Such examples testify to the uselessness and even harmfulness of the Federal List of Extremist Materials as a tool and remind us that the best way out would be to abandon it.

Sources

• The Presidium excluded the video "Donald Duck and Fascism" from the list of materials recognized as extremist // Website of the Kamchatka Regional Court. 2016. July 18.