A bill to combat the spread of “criminal subcultures” has been introduced into the Duma

The bill proposes to empower the federal executive authorities to block information that promotes the ideology of criminal subcultures.

On August 18, 2020, it became known that Senator Alexander Bashkin submitted to the State Duma draft law No. 1009841-7 "On Amendments to the Federal Law "On the Basics of the Crime Prevention System in the Russian Federation" and the Federal Law "On Information, Information Technologies and Information Protection »in terms of implementing mechanisms for preventing and counteracting the spread of criminal subcultures in the Russian Federation."

According to the text of the draft law, the Federal Law "On the fundamentals of the crime prevention system in the Russian Federation" proposes to introduce a definition of "criminal subculture" as "a system of principles, views, image life and norms of behavior shared by a group of people, informally uniting to popularize and promote criminal traditions, paraphernalia of the criminal world, manifestations of intolerance towards law-abiding behavior and justifying criminal behavior".

It is also planned to supplement the law with a definition of "activities for the formation and support of criminal subcultures", which will include:

• public justification, including using the net "Internet", criminal acts of persons convicted of committing intentional crimes;

• placement on the Internet of information containing ideology criminal subculture, its symbols and paraphernalia, with the exception of cases when such information is placed for the purpose of forming negative attitude towards the ideology of the criminal subculture and there are no signs of propaganda or justification of criminal subcultures;

• coercion to provide material, financial and other assistance convicted if such actions do not contain elements of a criminal punishable act;

• preventing the correction of convicts or calling for failure to fulfill the basic duties of convicts;

• inciting hatred or enmity towards employees law enforcement agencies, justice, prosecutor's office and penitentiary system, judges in connection with the execution of their respective powers;

• organization and preparation of these acts, as well as incitement to their implementation;

• financing of these acts or other assistance in their organization, preparation and implementation, including through provision of educational, printing and material and technical base, telephone and other types of communication or provision of information services.

In the list of grounds for including resources in the Unified Register of Prohibited Sites by decision of the authorized federal executive bodies (part 5 of article 15.1 of the Federal Law "On Information"), it is proposed to add paragraph "and" with the following content: "information aimed at carrying out activities for formation and support of the criminal subculture".

In an explanatory note, Bashkin notes that "the current legislation of the Russian Federation contains norms aimed at combating the propaganda of extremism, however, in in most cases, propaganda of a criminal lifestyle and criminal ideology, which is similar to extremism social hazardous value, is not covered by the relevant provisions federal laws."

The proposed bill seems to us unsuccessful for a number of reasons. The bill is a continuation of measures to combat the AUE subculture, which has just been banned as a single extremist organization, which in reality is not. But it should be noted that if the bill is adopted, its scope may be much broader than the fight against a specific subculture. Thus, the bill operates with vague concepts such as justifying criminal acts, preventing the correction of convicts or calling for convicts to fail to fulfill their duties, as well as facilitating all this. If it is approved, representatives of the executive branch will have the opportunity, if they wish, to bring under these definitions both public discussions of controversial cases and the provision of public or human rights assistance to prisoners and stop such initiatives by blocking information about them.

It is also possible that such a consequence as tightening censorship in the cultural sphere, and the assurances of the developers that, for example, chanson will not fall under the bill, are not supported by sufficiently reliable guarantees in the text of the document. Meanwhile, it is obvious that it is useless to fight the romanticization of crime with prohibitive, violent measures: this is a matter of ensuring public confidence in the judicial and penitentiary systems, a matter of working with public morality and public opinion in the spirit of rejection of the cult of violence.

Finally, we consider it unnecessary to duplicate the bans. The protection of representatives of the authorities in the execution, to which the bill is partly directed, is provided by a number of criminal articles, and hate propaganda against them, which is not a specific feature of the AUE subculture and therefore should not be considered in its context, is currently subject to anti-extremist norms .   Sources

• Bill No. 1009841-7 // CREATION GAS "Lawmaking". 2020. August 18.
• The Federation Council said that the chanson will not be blocked for promoting a criminal subculture // TASS. 2020. August 18.