Prohibition of certain actions instead of arrest: Yandex Taxi, friends and funerals

The court changed the measure of restraint for schoolboy Kirill Kuzminkin, accused of making a bomb, from house arrest to a ban on certain actions. Aleksey Polikhovich figured out how this type of restriction of freedom works in Russia.

Kirill Kuzminkin is forbidden to leave his house from 10 pm to 7 am, receive and send letters, communicate with witnesses in his criminal case, their relatives and lawyers, attend public events, use the Internet and telephone. Since October 30, the teenager has been under house arrest, and before that, he was in a pre-trial detention center for almost a year. The prohibition of certain actions is definitely a milder measure of restraint for him.

If we turn to the statistics of the Judicial Department , in the first half of 2019, the courts received 611 motions to ban actions for defendants in criminal cases, 545 of them were satisfied. For comparison, over the same six months, 47,951 people were placed in a pre-trial detention center, and 3,107 were placed under house arrest.

The prohibition of certain actions as a possible preventive measure was introduced in April 2018. As stated in article 105.1 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, it is used if a milder measure of restraint cannot be chosen. In this case, an undertaking not to leave is considered a milder measure.

The court may prohibit a person from leaving the house at certain hours, being in certain places or attending certain events, communicating with certain people, using the mail, the Internet, and a car or any vehicle if the charge is related to a traffic violation. Several bans from this list can be set, or all of them together. In addition, a person is obliged, upon request, to come to court or to the investigator.

At the same time, the suspect or the accused cannot be prohibited from calling an ambulance, the police, emergency services, if necessary, even if the court has established a ban on using the phone. However, a person must report a violation of the ban to the Federal Penitentiary Service.

If a person is hospitalized, the prohibitions continue to apply - only the prohibition not to leave the house is transferred to the hospital.

“Why not ban orange pants?”

In political and high-profile cases, the prohibition of certain actions is applied, for example, in some cases of Jehovah's Witnesses , in the case of the Khachaturian sisters , as well as in cases of repeated violations at rallies against activists Vyacheslav Yegorov in Kolomna and Andrey Borovikov in Arkhangelsk.

According to Egorov's lawyer Maria Eismont, depending on the number of bans and their severity, this preventive measure may be closer to house arrest or, conversely, to a written undertaking not to leave the country.

After the arrest, Yegorov was placed under house arrest, and six months later the investigation petitioned for a ban on actions. Egorov was banned from using the Internet, leaving Moscow and the Moscow Region, attending any mass events and communicating with the defendants in the criminal case, among whom were many of the activist's close friends and associates. The prosecution's motion to prohibit leaving the house from 22:00 to 06:00 was rejected by the court.

“They served it with sauce that I need to work and earn money,” says Yegorov. - It was funny, only six months later they decided that it was time to earn some money for me, because I have children, although we told them about this before. At the time of any events, I had to be at home. A thousand events are held in the region and in Moscow, that is, I have to be at home all the time. Nonsensical nonsense. At each extension, they stuck a clause about the ban on going out at night, each time the court rejected it. They protested, the second instance approved the decision of the first. Absolutely stupid demand, no arguments, no justification. And why not forbid Yegorov to walk in orange pants?

Prior to his arrest, the activist worked as a project manager and commercial director - these activities could not be continued due to the ban on using the Internet. “How to work in general in the modern world without the Internet? How to work with such a specialization? No way. Either I break the ban, or I don’t, but then I can’t work,” the activist says.

In addition, Egorov moonlighted as a taxi driver, using the Yandex-Taxi service for this. But since the application works with the help of the Internet, now Egorov could not use it either. The defense asked the investigation to allow the use of the program, arguing that through it it is impossible to write posts or communicate with the outside world - only passengers and maps of the area. But the request was not granted.

“What is left to do? Well, a janitor, a worker. But I have three children, I cannot work for 20 thousand rubles. The period was difficult, relatives and friends helped, ”complains Yegorov.

According to the court order, the activist did not have the right to meet with all his friends, even if they wanted to help him. Those who got into the case as witnesses were considered defendants, and therefore Yegorov could not talk to them. “You can meet with these friends, you can’t meet with these, it turns out, we meet in separate groups,” says the activist.

An even more absurd ban on meeting people was in the case of Andrey Borovikov. He was forbidden to communicate with all participants of the rally held on April 7, 2019 in Arkhangelsk. There were, according to various estimates, from 2 thousand to 8 thousand.

"Absurd! Borovikov is indignant. - I just physically could not remember such a number of people and probably violated the ban without knowing it myself. In response to my complaints to the court about this, I was told in the corridors of the court that the court did not care about my difficulties.”

Both Borovikov and Yegorov were banned from attending public events. Both of them had bracelets on their legs, through which the FSIN officers could follow their movements. “You feel as if you were chained to the wall and held,” says Yegorov. - I was at Kostya Kotov's court, the Fsinovites look at the trackers and ask: “Where were you? Did you participate in the event or not? And write an explanation." Even the most innocent actions led to the fact that I had to write an explanatory note - for example, what I did at the funeral of [human rights activist Sergei] Sharov-Delaunay.”

"More options not to plant"

On December 27, the court changed the preventive measure for Vyacheslav Yegorov to a written undertaking not to leave, allowing him to use the Internet and even travel to neighboring regions for work. There have been no events in his criminal case for a long time. Egorov believes that the investigators themselves are not very happy with it, and his further fate is connected with how the state closes the story of Konstantin Kotov, an activist who was sentenced to four years under the same article on repeated violations at rallies. On January 27, the Constitutional Court decided to reconsider the case of Kotov.

Andrei Borovikov was assigned 400 hours of compulsory labor by a court verdict, and the preventive measure was canceled in connection with this. Recently, the prosecutor's office asked to toughen the punishment for Borovikov, but the court refused .

Commenting on his experience, Yegorov calls the prohibition of actions "imaginary freedom." “You are trapped in the framework, in limbo. Of course, you are more free [than under house arrest], not to mention the legality of applying a measure of restraint to me in general,” he notes.

Egorov's lawyer, Maria Eismont, considers the application of the ban on certain actions to be generally a positive phenomenon: “It's good that they introduced a new measure of restraint, there are more options not to plant. You can simply forbid not to communicate with someone to a person, and not to plant him. And unlike bail, which is rarely allowed, barring actions works.”