New 282nd: Will they stop planting reposts in Russia?
Dmitry Kurkin
Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed to soften the law on extremism, by changing Part 1 of Article 282 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation and partially excluding criminal responsibility for inciting hatred or hatred or humiliation of human dignity. Relevant bills have already been submitted to the State Duma. If the amendments are adopted, the majority of open criminal cases instituted for publication and repost of materials on the Internet, in which experts saw signs of extremism, can be closed and reclassified into administrative ones (under Article 20.3.1 of the Administrative Code, which provides for penalties of ten to twenty thousand rubles, up to one hundred hours of compulsory work or arrest for up to fifteen days). The law will also have retroactive effect, that is, it will allow the annulment of already passed sentences.
Criminal punishment will be threatened only for repeated violation of the law, and committed within a year after bringing to administrative responsibility - this excludes the situation of two cases opened simultaneously, for example, for two repost images in social networks. At the same time, the publication duration for the article of the administrative code will not matter.
Calls to soften the article sounded before: from the moment it began to apply to the Internet, it actually turned into a repressive tool. According to the human rights organization Agora, only in 2017, due to “extremist” publications and reposts, 411 people became defendants in criminal cases, and 48 received real deadlines (and this is most likely incomplete data - only those cases about which became known).
Lawyers say that the phrase "extremism" remains extremely vague and ambiguous. Therefore, the use of Article 282 has long gone beyond the fight against the rehabilitation of Nazism and the propaganda of organizations whose activities in Russia are prohibited. A thematic account with descriptions of pictures that appear in cases of network extremism, “text memes for which you sit down,” even appeared on Twitter. Moreover, up to the recent explanations of the Supreme Court, which proposed to take into account the coverage of the publication audience and its effect in the form of likes and reposts, even a closed post, which was viewed by one user, could become a reason for the criminal case.
From the moment the article spread to the Internet, it actually turned into a repressive tool.
So, in early September in Omsk, a criminal case was opened against the radical feminist Lyubov Kalugina - she is accused of inciting hatred towards men. Kalugin herself insists that "almost ninety percent of the screenshots [submitted as evidence] are jokes and fights between feminists." The process of Maria Motuznaya, accused of extremism and insulting the feelings of believers (article 148.1 of the Criminal Code), continues in Barnaul, the reason for this was anti-clerical memes and pictures of people of African descent - the accused kept them on her old VK account. Motuznaya confessed, but later refused them, stating that they were the result of legal ignorance, which the investigation took advantage of: "I hoped for the officers who told me that if I signed everything, the punishment would be easy."
The Motuznaya case became a landmark in the epoch of “deadlines for memes” (it partly provoked massive stripping of their accounts with VKontakte users), and the trial promises to be a source of many precedents (for example, the hearings discuss whether the word “Negro” can be considered offensive ). However, this is not the only indicative case in recent practice. So, after the political anecdote published by him, Eduard Nikitin, whose personal correspondence the administration of VKontakte transmitted to the investigators, is accused of inciting hatred towards Russians and Russians, while he himself applies to both groups. Investigators also called Yekaterinburg neo-pagan Vladimir Manuilenko an extremist, whose work attracted the attention of local ROC representatives.
Attract attention and methods of doing business and litigation. For example, a resident of Barnaul, Andrei Shasherin, accused under article 282 because of the memes he placed about the Russian Orthodox Church and the patriarch, is tried to be declared insane. And Elina Mamedova from Yalta was ordered to take DNA samples, saliva and voice.
Having reached the Internet, Article 282 opened the Pandora's box, both in terms of the scale of images and texts in which signs of extremism can be found, and in legal practice. Apparently, this has already been understood in the State Duma and in the presidential administration, and the current amendments to the extremist article should at least regularize the chaos. As for the real easing of punishments for repost, it still remains questionable: as explained by Mediazon, the proposed changes will not affect Article 280 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (public calls for extremist activity), which is also widely used against Russian users.
Photo: MariaFrancesca - stock.adobe.com (1, 2)