The President of the FEOR commented on the recommendations of the HRC on changing the anti-extremist policy

Aleksander Boroda supported some recommendations of the Human Rights Council, and criticized others.

On August 24, 2018, President of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia (FEOR) Alexander Boroda commented on the recommendations of the Russian Presidential Council for Human Rights (HRC) concerning the reform of anti-extremist legislation and law enforcement practice. According to him, the HRC's proposals " leave a double impression ."

Boroda agreed that persecution for reposting someone's publications, especially those made in order to condemn them, would discredit the fight against extremism. " Article 282 of the Criminal Code may well do without words about inciting social discord, and any believer who claims that it is his religion that is true can be summed up under the term about asserting religious superiority, " he noted.

The head of the FEOR also spoke out in support of the decriminalization of Part 1 of Art. 282 of the Criminal Code (inciting hatred or enmity) and Part 1 of Art. 148 of the Criminal Code (insulting the feelings of believers). “ The main thing is that in both cases the offender should feel the inevitability of punishment ,” Boroda noted, recalling that the Jewish community of Russia has long proposed punishing anti-Semitic statements not with suspended sentences, but with large fines.

Beard also supported the proposal to hold mandatory meetings on the recognition of materials as extremist in the presence of the defendants. He recalled that due to the imperfection of this process, a work of art from the 19th century ( the novel The Forcibly Baptized by Markus Lehmann ) was included in the Federal List of Extremist Materials.

A number of HRC proposals were criticized by Boroda. In particular, he believes that the proposal to change Part 1 of Art. 20.3 of the Code of Administrative Offenses. The HRC proposed to punish under this article for displaying prohibited symbols only in cases where it was a question of propaganda of the corresponding prohibited ideology. According to Boroda, in the 1990s, when such a wording was contained in this article of the Code of Administrative Offenses, it was a loophole used by anti-Semites to evade responsibility.

The president of the FEOR also disagrees with the proposal that the courts take into account, when considering Internet propaganda, the real size of the audience of the accused and his authority. Boroda believes that " the audience may be limited to ten people, but one of them may be someone like Alexander Koptsev, who massacred the synagogue on Bolshaya Bronnaya in Moscow after reading all sorts of fringe sites. "

Finally, Boroda opposed the abolition of the unwieldy Federal List of Extremist Materials. Its existence, according to the head of the FEOR, led to the disappearance of many anti-Semitic books from the shelves. “ It should rather be about reforming the list and automatically banning texts that appear on the Internet that are variants of those already on the list ,” Boroda believes.

Sources

• The FEOR President commented on the proposals of the Human Rights Council to adjust the anti-extremist legislation // FEOR website. 2018. August 24.