"Maybe I should listen to the deputies?"

MosoLdom confirmed the right of citizens to attend the councils of local self -government - after the scandal on the Internet

Stupin's resident Konstantin Fokin came to a meeting of the Council of Local Self -Government - to listen to the deputies. The deputies demanded that a citizen leave the meeting room. “Orange revolutions begin with such incidents, and then the civil war!”, “He spit on us and sits here”, “Either we call the police or stop the meeting,” the representatives of the local authorities were indignant. The video, in which the deputies in vain demand that the citizen retire is widely dispersed on the Internet with this commentary of users: “Maybe I also listen to deputies to go to go?”

In order to defend his right to listen to what the deputies say, Fokin appealed to the Stupinsky District Court demanding that the citizen “from the street” be recognized as unlawful at the meeting. The Stupinsky court granted his lawsuit. And on June 28, the Moscow Regional Court upheld the decision of the district court.

Konstantin Fokin is a private entrepreneur. The first time he came to a meeting of the local council in November last year. He came with a specific purpose - to listen to the deputies to understand which of them you can talk about his problem. Fokin wanted to invest in a rural school to open a creative workshop there. From his point of view, rural schools in comparison with urban are not enough state money:

“It was a private interest in a specific problem,” says Fokin. - I sent statements to attend the meeting, but received a refusal twice, and then they just stopped answering me. I came, took free space, and then they began to expel me. I came to the meeting eight times within six months. The last time at the entrance the guards knocked me down and hit me a couple of times. Now for me the struggle for the right to attend meetings is a kind of entrepreneurial project in the public sphere. I see the task that needs to be solved: to show everyone an example of how it should actually be.

In the court, Fokin was supported by an independent municipal deputy of Stupin Nikolai Kuznetsov. He was the only one of the deputy council who took the side of the entrepreneur. The rest - 19 members of United Russia - opposed.

“The citizen has the right to attend all the open meetings of local authorities established by the Constitution,” says Kuznetsov. - It seems to me that this is a very interesting topic, not tied specifically to Stupin. This special case is included in the federal agenda: does a citizen have such a right? After all, they did not even know about such a right - so that any “from the street” simply come and listen to the deputies.

The representative of the defendant, that is, the Council of Deputies, Natalya Kepova in court refused to communicate with reporters. The New Gazeta tried to contact the people's chosen ones who were present at the meetings when they removed Fokin, but three times refused to comment.

Kuznetsov told the “new” that in the Council of Deputies such a court decision was expected and had already prepared for how to get around it:

- In order not to let the inhabitants into their meetings, they plan to install large monitors on the ground floor of the administration, on which the meeting will be broadcast live. Three years ago, I offered to make a meeting - no one listened to me. But now the council decided that the recording would only take place online, so that later on the Internet it would not spread. Will they go against a court decision? They will simply use this situation as legal uncertainty. They say: "They say, you will not come to the State Duma and will not sit in your free place." So it is: formally the "presence" will be observed.