Translated material
The criminal prosecution of Andrei Shasherin was stopped
The investigator dismissed the case of the Barnaul resident, who was accused of insulting the feelings of believers and inciting hatred.
On January 10, 2019, the investigation handed a decision to dismiss the criminal case against him under part 1 of Art. 148 of the Criminal Code (insulting the feelings of believers) and Part 1 of Art. 282 of the Criminal Code (inciting hatred). The investigator ruled that Shasherin's actions contained no corpus delicti and he had the right to rehabilitation. The termination of the case followed the partial decriminalization of Part 1 of Art. 282 of the Criminal Code.
Shasherin was accused of publishing a number of images on the VKontakte social network (experts examined 36 images, but we did not know the exact number of images whose publication the investigation considered illegal). Among them was a picture in which Jesus Christ asks the patriarch: "Can you tell me the time?", to which he answers obscenely. As follows from the excerpts from the case file available to us, in at least two more images, the experts found " a negative attitude towards Russians " and " a negative attitude towards the natives of the Caucasus and Central Asia and signs of inciting hostility and hatred against a group of people, an incitement to hostile actions " .
We believed that if Shasherin was accused of publishing only three of these images, then his persecution under Art. 148 of the Criminal Code was illegal. We are convinced that the concept of "insulting the feelings of believers", introduced in Art. 148 of the Criminal Code, does not and cannot have a clear legal meaning, and the aforementioned image on a religious theme did not contain any aggressive appeals, and its publication, in principle, should not have become a reason for criminal prosecution. An unequivocal assessment of the validity of the prosecution of Shasherin under Art. 282 of the Criminal Code for the publication of the other two pictures, we did not give: in both images, the connection between the statement and violence was traced, and if the first picture could be interpreted as political satire, then the second one carried an unambiguous aggressive racist appeal.
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