"Joke about the Koran" by video blogger Maddison included in the list of extremist materials

The prosecutor's office of Chechnya has achieved a ban on a video with a speech by video blogger Ilya Davydov.

On April 20, 2017, the video “Joke about the Koran” with a speech by video blogger Ilya Davydov, known as Maddison, was included in the Federal List of Extremist Materials under number 4086. The video was declared extremist by the Zavodskoy District Court of Grozny on February 22, 2017.

This is an excerpt from Davydov's 2012 speech. In the skit, Maddison uses profanity to describe how he bought a Koran and went to the toilet to read it, only to find that there was no toilet paper. The comedian goes on to say that he had to wipe himself, but - contrary to the audience's expectations - not with a book, but with a sock. Emphasizing that " nothing has happened to the Quran ," he shows off a dirty sock and puts it in the book. At the end of the speech, Davydov states that the book he was showing was in fact the Bible.

After the video was published in January 2017 by the Muslim channel Demand Knowledge on Telegram, Davydov began to receive numerous insults, after which he had to delete his social media accounts (he reappeared on the Internet only in April). According to one of the video blogger's acquaintances, supporters of the "Islamic State" banned in Russia began to threaten him, and unknown people broke into the door of his parents' apartment. As a result, Maddison, according to some reports, left Russia. On January 23, the Russian Congress of the Peoples of the Caucasus (RKNK) appealed to the Investigative Committee, the prosecutor's office and the Ministry of Internal Affairs with a demand to initiate a case under Art. 148 of the Criminal Code (insulting the feelings of believers).

On February 3, 2017, the prosecutor's office of the Chechen Republic announced that it had sent materials to the Investigative Committee to resolve the issue of criminal prosecution of Davydov under Part 1 of Art. 282 of the Criminal Code (humiliation of the dignity of a person or a group of persons on grounds of attitude to religion). At the same time, an application was prepared to the court to recognize the video recording of Maddison's speech as extremist. According to a psycholinguistic study commissioned by the prosecutor's office, the video contains actions and statements aimed at humiliating a person and a group of people on the grounds of an attitude towards Islam and Christianity. On February 13, the Chechen prosecutor's office reported that on February 10, an investigator of the Investigative Committee opened a criminal case against Davydov under Part 1 of Art. 282 of the Criminal Code, but soon this information was removed from the official republican sites for an unknown reason.

Davydov's speech can be called provocative, but we believe that the distribution of this video does not pose any public danger. In addition, we are skeptical about the Federal List of Extremist Materials itself as a tool: it already has more than 4,000 items, and quite harmless materials also fall into their number. Such examples testify to the uselessness and even harmfulness of this list and remind us that the best way out would be to abandon it.

We also believe that the grounds for bringing Davydov to criminal liability under Art. 282 of the Criminal Code no. You can read more about our position here .

Sources

• Federal list of extremist materials // Website of the Ministry of Justice of Russia. 2017. April 20.