In war on free expression, Putin approves restrictive legislation

08 Jul 13 | Comment, Europe and Central Asia, In the News

Russia keeps adopting repressive laws that further restrict freedom of expression and other fundamental rights of its citizens, Andrei Aliaksandrau writes

President Vladimir Putin worked hard last Saturday, sacrificing his week-end to state affairs. He signed two laws, previously passed by the national parliament. The first one bans “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relationships”; it provides for heavy fines for “promotion of denial of traditional family values among minors.” The second law amends the Russian Criminal Code providing for up to one year in prison for “insult to religious feelings of believers.”

Adoption of both laws marks not only further deterioration of the freedom of expression situation in Russia, but also signals the country’s authorities ignore appeals from international community, human rights standards and their own international commitments.

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Last week Index together with 23 more human rights groups called the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) to condemn the “homosexual propaganda” bans. We reminded about the decision of the UN Human Rights Committee that found prohibition of “homosexual propaganda” in Ryazan Region of Russia violating Article 19(2) and Article 26 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The principles of that decision were later affirmed in the opinion of the Venice Commission, which considered that bans on “homosexual propaganda” are “incompatible with the ECHR and international human rights standards.”

On 27 June PACE called on Russia to reject the law. But only two days later President Putin inked it to show no one is allowed to interfere with his manner of ruling his “sovereign democracy.”

Another blow against the LGBT-community followed last Wednesday, when Vladimir Putin signed a law that bans adoption of Russian children by same-sex couples or even by citizens of countries where same-sex marriage is allowed.

One more legal act that received Putin’s signature on 3 July is the “anti-pirate” law aimed against web sites that illegally distribute copyrighted video content. It will come into force on 1 August 2013, despite criticism from key industry players. Leading web companies are concerned with provisions of the law that suggest corporate censorship.

“The law provides for a possibility of blocking of internet platforms by ISPs that we have always opposed to as it inevitably threatens resources of legal content distribution,” Svetlana Anurova, a representative of Google in Russia, told Digit.ru.

Russia keeps building repressive legislative network that restricts freedom of expression, as well as other fundamental rights. Previous legal initiatives brought to life included the notorious “foreign agent” law, aimed against NGOs that receive foreign funding, re-criminalisation of defamation, and creation of a blacklist of sites with “harmful” information under a pretext of child protection.

“Law-making the State Duma has been down to over the last year makes me question common sense of Russian MPs. It looks like they do believe they can regulate everything by laws, from street rallies to sexual relationships of citizens. Passing of such laws is an attempt to shift the focus of public attention from internal problems of Russia, people’s disaffection and questionable legitimacy of MPs themselves to search for enemies in ‘foreign agents’, LGBT community or ‘insulters’ of religious feelings,” Dmitry Makarov, a co-chair of the International Youth Human Rights Movement, told Index.

The scale and pace of passing repressive laws won the Russian State Duma a nickname of “a Crazy Printer.” And it does not seem to run out of paper and new ideas about what to restrict.

Vladimir Putin and the new defence of the faithful

14 Jun 13 | Comment, Europe and Central Asia, News and features

Russia’s new blasphemy law is censorship under the guise of protection for believers, says Padraig Reidy
putin-kirill
In his speech on Russia’s Constitution Day in December 2012, Vladimir Putin bemoaned the decline of spiritual values.

“Today, Russia suffers an apparent deficit of spiritual values,” said Putin, as his Orthodox ally Patriarch Kirill nodded along.

The former KGB man continued: “We must wholeheartedly support the institutions that are the carriers of traditional values.”

So far, so Mother Russia.

What was interesting was that the president went on to say that it would be “amoral” to create laws governing spirituality.  Putin  commented ““Any attempts of the government to intervene with people’s beliefs are effectively a sign of totalitarian rule. It’s absolutely out of the question. It’s not our way.”

This would seem at odds with this week’s passing of a new blasphemy law, which will impose prison sentences and fines on people convicted of “public actions expressing clear disrespect for society and committed with the goal of offending religious feelings of the faithful”.

But it is in fact very much in the mould of the current trend for religious defamation law.

Traditionally, blasphemy was the crime of causing offence to God himself; now it is recast as causing offence to believers. Blasphemy laws are here to protect us. Look back at the testimony durings Pussy Riot’s trial, and again and again you hear the stories of poor innocent believers who were shocked by the women’s behaviour; even if the Patriarch and the president had wished to forgive the punk group, they had to think of the poor pious babushkas who had been rocked to the very core by an act that some admitted to not actually having witnessed.

Shamefully, Ireland has led the way in this trend. The Irish Defamation Act of 2009 established definitions and punishments for blasphemy where none had previously existed (in spite of the fact that the 1937 constitution recognised blasphemy as a crime, it did not define what blasphemy was, and thus, there had never been a conviction for blasphemy, or even a full trial, in the country).

The Irish law defines religious defamation as any action likely to cause “outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of [a] religion”, with fines of up to e25,000 payable by those found guilty.

The wording of the Irish bill was used as a template in the Organisation of Islamic Conference’s attempts to get the UN to recognise religious defamation as a crime.

Of course, the old-fashioned definitions of blasphemy still exist: in Egypt this week, writer Amer Saber was given a five-year sentence for “contempt of religion” for authoring a short story collection called “Where is God?”. And in Syria, a teenager was reportedly shot in front of his family merely for uttering the name of Muhammad. The abuses of blasphemy law in Pakistan are only too well known.

But the justification for blasphemy laws, as with many other censorious impulses, is increasingly tied up in the idea that people should be protected from offence, from controversy, even from being challenged.

Perhaps the most offensive notion is that we cannot deal with ideas, even aggressively expressed ideas, that we disagree with. Government’s such as Putin’s are all too happy to shut down free speech and repackage censorship as benign protection.