By Connie Hong
Impunity Watch Reporter, Europe 

MOSCOW, Russia — On June 13, 2012, Natella Boltyanskaya, Olga Bychkova, Alina Grebneva, Vladimir Varfolomeev, and Alexander Podrabinek were detained by Russian police after engaging in peaceful, individual pickets.  The five journalists were trying to hold up posters to support their colleague, Sergei Sokolov, who had received threats from the head of the Investigation Committee, Alexander Bastrykin.  One of the detained journalists said that the police moved so rapidly to arrest them that only two of the journalists had time to unravel and display their posters.  Sergei Sokolov, the deputy chief editor of Novaya Gazeta, began receiving threats from Bastrykin after accusing Bastrykin and the rest of the Investigation Committee of aiding crime bosses in a recent article.

The journalists were protesting separately in front of Russia’s Investigation Committee, the state agency in charge of criminal investigations, when police officers forced them into a van.  Despite the fact that each of the journalists were careful to stand some distance away from the others, they were all taken to the Basmanny precinct in central Moscow.  There, they were questioned and forced to provide written statements explaining their actions before they were released without charge.

Bychkova told Human Rights Watch that demonstrating individually does not, by law, require authorization in advance.  The recent legislation on public rallies however, defined individual pickets as organized public events if they appear to “have attributes of planned collective action,” and therefore require prior authorization.  It is under the new regulations that the police found a basis for detaining the journalists.  Bychkova said that the police had warned them at the precinct “not to attempt any such thing in the future,” and continually referred to the new law.

The detention of the five journalists sparked media outcry and inspired other journalists to show up at the Investigation Committee building.  A policeman told one of the journalists that taking over someone else’s poster qualifies as collective action, and would give him the right to arrest her.  When asked if she could draw her own poster, the policeman replied: “If your new poster revolves around the same idea as the other poster, it will mean that this is an organized public action, not an individual picket.”

Noting their repressive and abusive nature, Humans Rights Watch has sharply criticized Russia’s new regulations on peaceful assembly.  It urged the Kremlin to revise the new law since it so starkly conflicts with Russia’s duty to respect and uphold freedom of expression and peaceful demonstration.  According to Tanya Lokshina, a senior researcher for Russia at Human Rights Watch, “Even if a law gives police powers of detention, to use them to suppress the legitimate exercise of fundamental rights makes that use arbitrary and abusive.”

 

For further information, please see:

Human Rights Watch — Russia: Five Journalists Detained — 14 June 2012

Gulf Times — Top Russian journalist flees ‘investigator’s death threat’— 13 June 2012

The Republic — Russian top investigator threatens reporter, paper says — 13 June 2012

Human Rights Watch — Russia: Reject Restrictions on Peaceful Assembly — 8 June 2012