13 Nov 15 | Europe and Central Asia, mobile, News and features, Russia
Archangel on the roof of St. Isaac’s Cathedral, St.Petersburg, Russia. Credit: Akimov Igor / Shutterstock
Since the amended blasphemy law came into force in July 2013, Russian journalists have faced a growth of religious censorship. This is according to a new study by Zdravomyslie, a foundation that promotes secularism.
Insulting religious beliefs of citizens was previously regulated by the Code of Administrative Offences and punishable by a fine not exceeding 1 thousand roubles (around $15). But after the scandal of the punk-prayer of feminist group Pussy Riot, who were sentenced to two years in jail for a performance in the Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in 2012, the Russian parliament adopted amendments that criminalised blasphemy.
Since July 2013, “public actions, clearly defying the society and committed with the express purpose of insulting religious beliefs” has been declared a federal crime and is punishable by up to three years in jail.
Evgeniy Onegin, a Zdravomyslie researcher, said that the imprecise wording of the law and stricter punishments have affected media freedom and resulted in a growth of self-censorship among journalists. His report Limitation of Media Freedom as a Consequence of the Law About Protection of Feeling of Believers was presented at a conference in Moscow at the end of October.
Onegin interviewed 128 employees of dozens of media organizations, including a major national television channel, radio stations, newspapers and websites. The majority, 119, said that after the revised blasphemy law came into force, managers told them not to mention religions, religious problems, traditions and “different manifestations of unbelief”. Some media organisations even prohibited usage of words “God”, “Allah” and “atheist” in headlines.
A journalist at a sports news website told the researcher that censorship had extended to idioms. For example, headlines “Hulk has talent from God” (about a Brazilian forward playing for Zenit Saint Petersburg football club) and “God’s hand helped Maradona” (about the score of the Argentinian forward at the World Cup in Mexico in 1986) were corrected to exclude the word “God”. The second headline was corrected a long time after publication because editorial staff decided to check archived articles.
Media professionals involved in a production of entertaining content also faced censorship. For example, a respondent working for a sketch show told Onegin about a ban on jokes containing phrases like “God will forgive you” or “you are definitely descended from a monkey”.
However, exceptions to the general policy of avoiding religious issues were made for Orthodox Church, which was confirmed by over the half of all respondents. For example, a journalist working for a national television channel said that her colleagues were told not to show “non-traditional for Russia religious symbols and signs”. However, the term non-traditional was not specified, so journalists started to avoid showing any religious objects, except those associated with the Orthodox Christianity.
The authors of the report presented a list of the most undesirable topics, which according to the respondents are potentially violations of the law. First place went to protest actions against the Orthodox Church (according to 84% of respondents), the second was atheism and unbelief (49%) and third place was coverage of religious events (23%).
Journalists also gave Onegin examples of when they were told not to cover stories: cancellation of celebration of Labour Day because of a coincidence with the holy week of Orthodox Lent; cancellation of performances of the Cannibal Corpse rock group due protests by Orthodox activists; protests of Orthodox activists against Leviathan, a movie by Andrey Zvyagentsev; cancellation of an Lord of the Rings-related Eye of Sauron installation on a Moscow tower a critical comment by an Orthodox priest.
The researcher came to conclusion, that the new blasphemy law and political, social and cultural conditions formed around it “have had a serious impact on media organisations, limiting freedom of speech and indirectly turning them into an instrument of a dominating religious organisation – Russian Orthodox church” and prevent audience of Russian media from getting an objective picture of civil society.
However, pressure on the press in Russia comes from other religions too. In January 2015, tens of thousands people gathered at a rally against French magazine Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad in Grozny, the capital of predominantly Muslim Chechnya region. Kremlin-backed Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov not only accused European journalists in “insulting feeling of believers”, but also threatened those in Russia who supported Charlie Hebdo, including editor-in-chief of Echo of Moscow radio station Alexey Venediktov and former oligarch and vocal Kremlin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
Earlier, the Chechen prosecutor’s office opened one of the first cases under the article 148 of Criminal Code, the renewed blasphemy law. In April 2014, a user of Live Journal was accused of “negative comments, expressing clearly disrespect for society and containing insulting remarks against people practicing Islam”. It was one of a few blasphemy cases that were opened in 2013-2014. However, in 2015 the use of article 148 of Criminal Code has stopped being a rareness.
In February 2015, another citizen of Chechen Republic was accused of insulting feelings of believers by posting a video on social networks. Also in February, the Investigative Committee began an initial inquiry into Tangazer opera staged in Novosibirsk theatre. In March, the first blasphemy case was opened in Ural region. In April, a user of the largest European social network, the St Petersburg-based VKontakte, was accused of insulting feelings of believers in his comments. At the end of October, VKontakte MDK was blocked by a St Petersburg court decision because it contained content that “insult feelings of believers and other groups of citizens”.
The imprecise wordings of the law and a wide range of its possible interpretations has arisen concerns of human rights activists. The several online campaigns were started to collect signatures under a petition calling for a repeal of the blasphemy law, but all of them failed to gain more than two thousand signatures.
This is one of a series articles on Russia published today by Index on Censorship. To read about the difficulties faced by Russia’s regional media in the face of growing political power, click here.
13 Nov 15 | Mapping Media Freedom, mobile, News and features, Russia
When the Tomsk-based station TV-2 ceased broadcasting earlier this year, Siberia lost one of its few independent stations. The channel was about as free as media can be in Russia: it wasn’t funded by a state or municipal budget.
The road to its closure began in April 2014 when an antenna malfunctioned. It took 45 days to get back on the air. When it resumed transmission in June 2014, Roskomnadzor – the Russian authority that oversees media and communications – revoked the station’s right to broadcast. A previous licence extension though 2025 had been issued as a result of a “computer error”, the agency explained.
On 1 January 2015, the station stopped broadcasting over the airwaves. In February 2015, it ceased to be an internet and cable station as well.
In Russia, independent media will not likely be shuttered because of critical coverage of the state. It will have its licence revoked because glitch or be silenced through a broken feeder or some other mundane technicality.
Early in the Putin era, Moscow-based national networks could be caught in a “dispute of economic entities” to silence narratives that were contrary to the government’s line. Media takeovers by businesses aligned with the government of President Vladimir Putin drew the world’s attention and criticism. But in Russia’s hinterland, the decline of media freedom was more precipitous.
Despite a professed respect for the rule of law in Russia, regional media outlets are caught between harsh oversight by local authorities and a lack of independent sources of funding. At the same time, business interests and regional governments are often more closely affiliated than in larger cities. Nepotism and conflicts of interest are rife while courts are hamstrung by corruption.
Journalists are often victims. According to Glasnost Defense Foundation, 150 journalists were killed in Russia during last 15 years. Authorities ignored crimes against journalists and tightened the screws by criminalising slander, which spurred lawsuits that helped destroy independent-minded free media.
When journalists do uncover corruption, regional authorities act to silence them by meting out punishment for “crimes” that the individual has committed. This is highlighted by the recent case of Natalya Balyakina, editor-in-chief of the newspaper Chaikovskie Vedomosti. A well-known journalist who investigated allegations of misconduct by local officials involving the area’s municipal housing and human rights violations, Balyakina was awarded the 2007 Andrey Sakharov prize for journalism.
On 22 October 2015, the Chaikovski city court sentenced her to three years of incarceration and 761,000 rubles ($11,818) in fines and damages. Balyakina was convicted of a crime that she allegedly committed five years ago, when she was director of the regional City Managing Company. Her former company has accused her of misappropriation and embezzlement.
Whether or not the allegations against Balyakina are true, Chaikovski regional authorities benefit by having yet another investigative journalist silenced.
Regional media must also contend with a dearth of independent funding. As a result, these outlets are often forced to sign affiliation agreements with local administrators. These deals come with restrictions on how the organisations can cover regional government activities.
Journalists reporting for these affiliated outlets say they receive direct instructions on what they can write about. The editor-in-chief of one newspaper was prohibited from publishing any issues regarding healthcare because there was nothing positive to cover. Regional events that are reported by national media — disasters or human rights violations — are not covered by local outlets due to positive news restrictions.
But even the cowed national media is under continued assault. The Russian Duma is considering a bill that will allow Roskomnadzor to compel media organisations to disclose foreign funding or material support. So software provided by Microsoft could cause a regional outlet to be labelled as a “foreign agent” on the same model of the NGO law that was passed in 2012.
Long under pressure from official censorship and self-censorship, journalists’ sources are now being constrained by punitive laws that have enlarged state secrets and toughened punishments. In June 2015, Putin signed a law that classified Ministry of Defence casualties during peacetime. The result is that journalists are now forbidden from reporting on the number of Russian soldiers killed in action in Ukraine or Syria.
The Federal Security Service (FSB) is also lobbying members of the Duma to pass a draft law that restricts freedom of information around real estate transactions. Some observers say that this will hinder work to uncover corruption committed by Russian officials carried out by bloggers and journalists.
The media in Russia became one of the core targets during the strengthening political powers in last decades, but the regional journalists are put in an especially weak position.
This is one of a series articles on Russia published today by Index on Censorship. To read about the chilling effect blasphemy laws have had on free speech in Russia, click here.
Mapping Media Freedom
Click on the bubbles to view reports or double-click to zoom in on specific regions. The full site can be accessed at https://mappingmediafreedom.org/
|
This article was posted at indexoncensorship.org on 13 November 2015
20 Oct 15 | Europe and Central Asia, Mapping Media Freedom, mobile, News and features, Russia
On 6 November 2010, prominent Russian journalist Oleg Kashin was badly beaten with a steel pipe on his doorstep and nearly killed. He suffered a broken skull and injuries to his legs and hands — including broken fingers and one amputated digit. He was hospitalised in a coma and spent months recovering. Dmitry Medvedev, who was then President of Russia, visited him promising that the case would be solved and the attackers would be punished.
At the time, Kashin’s editor told the BBC that the attack was retribution for articles he had written and that he had recently reported on anti-Kremlin protests and extremist rallies.
Two months prior to the assault, Kashin had had an online quarrel with Andrey Turchak, the powerful governor of the Pskov region. According to the police investigation into the attack, the alleged organiser Alexander Gorbunov paid 3.3 million roubles ($53,000) to ex-employees of the security department of Zaslon, a company owned by Turchak’s family, to beat Kashin. Later the wife of Danila Veselov, one of the defendants, gave an interview to the Kommersant newspaper, claiming that her husband had met Turchak before the attack and had recorded the governor saying that Kashin had to be beaten so he “could not write anymore”.
After five years of investigation, in September 2015, Kashin publicly named the men who were officially accused of attempted murder. Despite evidence of the possible involvement of Turchak, who is a son of a friend of Putin, he has not been questioned about the attack.
On 3 October, Kashin posted A Letter to the Leaders of the Russian Federation on his blog. In it, Kashin wrote about his frustrations, saying: “Your will in Russia is stronger than any law, and simply obeying the law is an impossible fantasy.” The open letter accuses the government of hindering the investigation into his violent assault and ends as a strong indictment of the whole political system in Russia.
Moreover, the investigator who arrested the attackers was suspended from the case. His successor was quoted in Kashin’s letter saying: “There’s the law, but there’s also the man in charge, and the will of the boss is always stronger than any law.”
In his letter, Kashin directly accused the leaders of the country of protecting Turchak from any judicial responsibility.
“You’ve decided to side with your Governor Turchak; you’re protecting him and his gang of thugs and murderers. It would make sense for somebody like me — a victim of this gang — to be outraged about all this and tell you that it’s dishonest and unjust, but I understand that such words would only make you laugh. You have complete and absolute control over the adoption and implementation of laws in Russia, and yet you still live like criminals.”
Kashin admitted that he does not expect a fair punishment for the alleged mastermind of his beating: “I can see perfectly well that the worst thing Turchak faces now is a quiet resignation, timed long after any developments in my case. This is the only justice citizens can expect, and it means that your system isn’t capable of any kind of justice at all.”
Kashin’s case has become the symbol of impunity for attacks and murders of journalists. Hundreds of leading Russian journalists signed a petition that demands the police question Turchak. Some of them publicly boycotted a literature festival in the Pskov region, while the Kremlin and the Gorbunov’s press office remained silent.
Kashin said he wishes all journalists would boycott Turchak and continue to send requests about his role in Kashin’s case to government officials. However, that level of solidarity seems to be impossible when so much of the media is directly run by the Kremlin and do not dare to do anything without its approval, said Kashin. He also holds out no hope for support from the Russian Union of Journalists, which he describes as “a weird organization” that doesn’t function properly.
According to Glasnost Defence Foundation, over 150 journalists were killed in Russia in last 15 years. The majority of these cases remain unsolved. Those who are accused of obstruction of professional activities of journalists, rarely face a fair punishment. Between 2006-2014, only one such defendant was sentenced to jail.
The murder of Igor Domnikov, a journalist with Novaya Gazeta, in 2000 has become the first case in the history of modern Russia where the mastermind behind the killing of a journalist was officially accused. In this case, it was a former Vice-Governor of Lipetsk region Sergey Dobrovskiy. After 15 years of investigations, he was summoned to a court in April 2015, but a month later the case against him was dropped due to the statute of limitations.
Kashin said he will not be surprised if his case goes the same way. However, he stressed that the difference is that the investigators don’t need 10 years more as there is already evidence.
“We can see that the government is just not interested in punishing criminals,” Kashin said.
Mapping Media Freedom
Click on the bubbles to view reports or double-click to zoom in on specific regions. The full site can be accessed at https://mappingmediafreedom.org/
|
09 Oct 15 | Europe and Central Asia, Mapping Media Freedom, mobile, News and features, Russia
The return of Vladimir Putin as president of the Russian Federation in 2012, after a wave of protests, was followed by the implementation of a new law that required non-governmental organisations receiving foreign support — in the form of funding or material aid — and engaged in “political activity” to register as “foreign agents” with the Ministry of Justice.
There are currently eight organisations advocating for media freedom and journalists’ rights included on a black list of 86 NGOs. Among them are organisations fighting for access to information (Freedom of Information Foundation), providing legal support to journalists (Rights of the Media Defence Centre and Media Support Foundation (Sreda)), organising education for regional reporters (Press Development Institute – Sibir in Novosibirsk and Regional Press Institute), an information agency (Memo.ru) and others.
Foreign agents have additional responsibilities and duties, including having to report twice as often and providing more information to the Ministry of Justice than other NGOs. A notice reading “Published by an NGO – foreign agent” must mark everything they publish, although some refuse to comply. In the Russian language, “foreign agent” has strong negative connotations associated with Joseph Stalin’s Soviet-era political repression. Some would say the term implies that NGOs are spies or traitors.
Only one organisation in Russia had voluntarily identified itself as a foreign agent before July 2014 when new rules allowed the Ministry of Justice to put NGOs on the list as it sees fit.
Some of the media freedom organisations are in the process of shutting down, including Sreda and Freedom of Information Foundation, while others, such as the Regional Press Institute (RPI) in St Petersburg, continue their activities but are forced to pay large fines.
Anna Sharogradskaya, the director of RPI, says she would never register the NGO voluntarily. “Article 51 of the Russian constitution says that nobody is obliged to give incriminating evidence against himself or herself and labeling the RPI would be not only incriminating evidence, it would be slander on our donors,” Sharogradskaya says. “So why should I break the law?”
Since 1993, RPI has provided seminars for journalists from Russia’s northwest region, offered its facilities as a venue for independent press conferences and meetings, and organised discussions on topical issues.
The organisation has come under increasing state pressure. In June 2014, customs officers at the Pulkovo International Airport in St Petersburg detained Sharogradskaya and searched her luggage. She missed her flight to the USA where she had been visiting scholar at Indiana University. Her notebook, memory stick and other gadgets were confiscated without explanation. For more than 10 months, Sharogradskaya was suspected of terrorism and extremism, after which she was cleared of all charges and her belongings were returned — although not in working order.
In November 2014, Putin promised that the St Petersburg regional Ombudsman Alexander Shishlov would look into the RPI case. “And he did: some days after this meeting, the Ministry of Justice put my organisation on the list of foreign agents,” says Sharogradskaya.
A court in St Petersburg fined RPI 400,000 rubles ($6,150) for refusing of add itself to the list voluntary. Half of the amount was paid by Russian and international journalists around the world, and the rest was added from Sharogradskaya’s personal savings.
Despite the pressure, RPI continues acting as an independent help desk for journalists, giving the region’s media, bloggers, initiative groups, democratic opposition leaders, and activists an opportunity to raise their voice at press conferences, and advocating for those who are in trouble with the authorities.
Many, including Sharogradskaya, believe that Russian civil society, including the media, faces increasing pressure. NGOs advocating for the freedom of the press must now spend more time and efforts protecting themselves instead of protecting journalists and other parts of the media.
Sharogradskaya says that above everything else, the lack of solidarity among journalists is a major concern. “Our work is to raise this solidarity. This is the only way to withstand the time of repressions.”
Mapping Media Freedom
Click on the bubbles to view reports or double-click to zoom in on specific regions. The full site can be accessed at https://mappingmediafreedom.org/
|
