Criminal Prosecution
In late December 2015, it became known that Yevgeny Kim, a Muslim resident of the Ivanovka village, was arrested in Blagoveshchensk of the Amur Region under Part 1 of the Criminal Code Article 282.2 (organizing activities of the organization banned for extremism). He is accused of participation in the activities of the banned religious organization Nurcular. Several Muslims, including Blagoveshchensk resident Anton Starodubtsev, are witnesses in this case. We would like to remind here that we consider inappropriate both the ban against books by Turkish theologian Said Nursi and the ban against Nurcular organization, which have never even existed in Russia - there are only isolated followers facing unreasonable persecution for studying books by Nursi.
In the second half of January, it was reported that Crimean resident Andrey Kolomiets, a citizen of Ukraine, was charged under Article 30 Part 3 paragraphs “a,” “b,” “e,” “l” and Part 2 Article 105 (attempted murder of two persons in connection with the performance of their duties, committed in publicly dangerous way and motivated by political or ideological hatred). He is accused of taking part in the clashes during the Maidan in Kiev in January 2014 as a member of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), throwing Molotov cocktails at two police officers from the Berkut unit and causing their clothes to catch fire (they were saved due to timely assistance). If the version of the Crimean law enforcement agencies is accurate, then Ukraine could have initiated a criminal case against Kolomiets and appealed to the Russian authorities to facilitate the investigation. By initiating a case on their own initiative, the Russian law enforcement agencies violated the rules for determining jurisdiction.
In late January, the parliament of Chechnya and about 30 deputies of the State Duma sent a request to the Prosecutor General and the Investigative Committee asking to examine a publication by Andrey Piontkovsky on the Echo of Moscow (Echo Moskvy) website for incitement to separatism and liability of a crime under Article 280.1 of the Criminal Code. The article in question, “A Bomb Ready to Explode,” was published on January 23 in Piontkovsky’s blog on the Echo of Moscow website. It ended with the assertion that, in order to avoid a disaster in the Russian-Chechen relations, Chechnya should be granted full independence. At some point after the publication, these words have been removed from the text on the website. As we stated earlier, we believe that only calls for violent separatism merit prosecution.
Administrative Prosecution, Organizations and Materials Banned as Extremist and Other Government Actions
In late December, Islamic scholar Rais Suleymanov, a resident of Kazan, was sentenced by the Privolzhsky District Court of Kazan to seven days of administrative arrest under Article 20.3 of the Administrative Code (public display of attributes of extremist organizations). On the eve of the New Year, the Supreme Court of the Republic of Tatarstan replaced Suleymanov’s administrative arrest with a fine of one thousand five hundred rubles. He was released after spending 24 hours in custody. The law enforcement objected to photographs with the Islamic State and Hizb ut-Tahrir flags, which accompanied the links to his interviews and to articles with his comments. Meanwhile, Suleymanov is known as an active opponent of “alternative Islam” even in much more moderate forms. We oppose prosecutions that target demonstration of banned symbols with no regard to the fact of presence or absence of propaganda context.
As we found out in December, two individuals faced responsibility under Article 20.29 of the Administrative Code for the distribution of inappropriate or prohibited material or storage thereof with intent to distribute. A female Jehovah's Witnesses follower was fined in Udachnoe (Yakutia) for distribution of banned pamphlets. A report under Article 20.29 of the Administrative Code was filed against the head of Jehovah's Witnesses in Birobidzhan after 10 banned publications by this religious organization had been found in their place of assembly. Since this is not the first fine imposed on the head of the Birobidzhan community, who had also received a warning about the impermissibility of her extremist activity, the community could face liquidation.
Thus, in late December 2015, the Belgorod Regional Court received а claim from the regional prosecutor's office seeking to terminate the activities of Jehovah's Witnesses communities of Belgorod and Stary Oskol due to their extremist activity. Earlier, in March 2015, a district court in Belgorod banned two brochures of Jehovah's Witnesses. As of now, the Jehovah's Witnesses communities of Taganrog, Samara and Abinsk in the Krasnodar Region have been recognized as extremist in Russia: in addition, 16 believers were convicted in Taganrog for continuing their activities. The Cherkessk Prosecutor’s Office was also taking steps to eliminate the local Jehovah's Witnesses organization in 2015. Prosecutors in Gorno-Altaisk failed in their attempt to ban their local community. We would like to reiterate that we consider the practice of banning Jehovah's Witnesses literature as extremist legally inappropriate and view persecution against Jehovah's Witnesses in Russia as religious discrimination.
As we found out in January, the Pervouralsk City Court of the Sverdlovsk Region refused to recognize as extremist the books Selected Hadith by Sheikh Muhammad Yusuf Kandhlawi and Is the Trinity Doctrine Divinely inspired? by M. A. C. Cave in December. According to a lawyer, who participated in the process, the law banning the recognition of the scriptures of the world religions as extremist, signed in November, became the decisive argument in the trial, even though the law applies only to four specific books. The prosecutors asked the court to recognize Selected Hadith, published in Kazan, as extremist based on the expert opinion by regional FSB linguist Svetlana Mochalova, according to whom the book contained information aimed at propaganda of exclusivity and superiority of Islam over other religions. Notably, the texts represented in the collection are hadith, the ancient narratives of Prophet Muhammad’s words and actions sacred to Muslims, while Kandhlavi (the ideologist of Tablighi Jamaat movement that is banned in Russia, in our opinion, inappropriately) only selected them and grouped by subject. As for Is the Trinity Doctrine Divinely inspired? published in Egypt, the expert opinion found it to contain statements aimed at inciting hatred on the basis of relationship to Christianity. The decision of the Pervouralsk Court became the first known case of a court refusing to recognize an item as extremist on the basis of “the law on the sacred texts.”
A case to follow in regard to the influence of this law is the claim of Jehovah's Witnesses against the customs office. The Administrative Center of Jehovah's Witnesses in Russia appealed to the Arbitration Court of St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region in mid-January complaining against the actions of the Vyborg customs office, which, on November 27, 2015, prevented a shipment of Bibles in the Synod translation and a shipment of “Learning Bibles,” published by the Russian Bible society, from entering Russia. The books were donated by a German Jehovah's Witnesses community to their fellow believers in Russia. The customs stopped the book shipment, citing failure to provide “the documents confirming compliance with the restrictions,” established by the law on countering extremist activity. In their claim, the Jehovah Witnesses point out that the law, exempting the Bible from the application of the anti-extremist legislation, has already entered into force at that time.
