August 2008. Monthly summary

In August 2008, not less than 25 people, including 5 dead, became victims of racially and neo-Nazi motivated violence (in August 2007, 6 people died and not less than 66 were injured). Apart from Moscow and St. Petersburg, such attacks were registered in Perm, Tula, Uljyanovsk and Chelyabinsk.

This abrupt decrease of the number of victims, on the one hand, can be explained by the lack of information. For example, in contrast to the previous years, we still have no reports on the attacks on August 2 (the official Day of Air Landing Forces, which is usually marked with disturbances), although we can presume that such attacks took place. On the other hand, in Moscow, the main center of violence, the law enforcement officials have become more active in combating hate crimes.

In all, since the beginning of the year, 318 people suffered as a result of racist and neo-Nazi attacks, out of whom 65 perished. To compare, in the same period of 2007, 423 people were injured and 56 killed.
Neo-Nazi skinheads remain the main perpetrators of violence, but there are also individuals committing xenophobic attacks, as it happened in Perm, where not less than 4 people, including one fatality, became victims of a lone xenophobe.

People from the Central Asia remain the principal objects of violent hate crimes. Since the beginning of the year, not less than 36 people were murdered and 80 were injured.
In August 2008, in Blagoveshchensk, one verdict was delivered against a DPNI activist for hatred propaganda. He was sentenced to 1 year of settlement colony. Overall, in 2008, concerning hatred propaganda, there have been 26 verdicts delivered against 35 people.

In August, after a break, caused by transferring the duty of maintaining the Federal List of Extremist Materials from Rosregistratsia to Ministry of Justice, the list was updated twice, and the number of entries has grown from 152 to 255. The major part of the materials deemed extremist were Muslim books, pamphlets and leaflets of Khizb ut-Takhrir and other groups and organizations.