DOXA

Raising funds to combat political persecution of university students

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DOXA_OVD

Over the past few weeks, more than 10 thousand people have been detained at protests in Russian cities. Many of these people are students. During this time, more than 150 people contacted our helpline for detained students, and more than ten DOXA team members worked to help them. More than 60 Russian universities intimidated students before going on peaceful protests, many of them threatened students with various sanctions.

We want to support young people - college and university students - in their right to peaceful protest and freedom of speech. Therefore, we are re-launching a systematic service to help students who are detained for political reasons at or in connection with protests in Russian cities (for example, for retweeting memes), and are also subject to pressure in their educational institutions. In 2019, we successfully carried out a similar campaign and paid fines for 20 students detained at summer protests.

1. help with the payment of fines to all students convicted in connection with participating in rallies or for other political reasons;
   
   
2. make public cases of pressure on students by law enforcement agencies and universities;
   
   
3. advise students on actions during/after arrest (lightening the burden of existing human rights organizations during a major wave of arrests);
   
   
4. help expelled students assert their rights with the help of human rights partners;
   
   
5. offer any other assistance depending on the current situation.

But we can't do anything without you. We exist on donations from our readers, and the launch of such a service has already increased our expenses many times over. Right now, it is difficult to estimate the exact amount of funds that will be needed to operate our service because it is difficult to predict the number of future detentions and arrests of students.

We estimate the first fundraising goal at 500 thousand rubles. This money will allow, for example, to pay for 25 fines, as well as the work of our hotline staff and news reporters for several weeks. But this money will definitely not be enough for the long-term operation of the service, so as the fundraising progresses, we will report in detail on expenses weekly and update the goal on the page.

Please support our project and tell your friends and family about it. Together we can conquer fear.

For any questions regarding the service, please contact our telegram bot .

Report for February 2021

After violent arrests at rallies in support of Alexei Navalny in February, we decided to relaunch the DOXA_OVD service to help university students and staff who are facing political persecution.

During the month of collection, we collected 270,274 rubles. 120 male and female students contacted the DOXA_OVD hotline with reports of arrests at rallies and requests for help. 12 students requested financial assistance from us to pay fines: 9 students are awaiting an appeal and we paid fines to 3 students totaling 30,000 rubles. We spent 76,000 rubles on technical and organizational support for the hotline, which includes: support for the telegram bot, payment for the work of news reporters and a team of editors responding to calls to the bot, illustration for the donation page DOXA_OVD.

Most of the donations for the DOXA_OVD service arrived in mid-February thanks to bionicle donations and the screening of the film, which was organized by Varya Weber and Sasha Dolgopolov, as well as with support from the stream of Michael Naki and Alexander Plyushchev. We are very grateful for the support and will continue to report on the costs of the service. New protests have been announced ahead, which means support for the detained students will again be required. Therefore, we ask you to support our DOXA_OVD service so that we can help university students and staff on an ongoing basis.