Authorities in Russia have degraded the right to freedom of peaceful assembly by employing increasingly restrictive regulations, heavy-handed police methods, and criminal prosecutions to stifle peaceful opposition, Amnesty International said today in a new briefing.
The group examines how the crackdown on peaceful protests, which began with the Federal Law on Assemblies in 2004, has increased in recent years through a series of legislative modifications and their increasingly selective and restrictive enforcement in “Russia: No Place for Protest.” As a result, there are now a slew of legal limits on when, where, how, for what purpose, and by whom people can exercise their freedom.
“For years, Russian authorities have been systematically restricting the right to freedom of assembly with extraordinary tenacity and ingenuity. No other topic has received as much attention at all levels of government.
As a result, state officials have come to regard peaceful street protest as a crime – and an act of heroism by those Russians who still think it is their right to exercise it,” said Amnesty International’s Russia Researcher, Oleg Kozlovsky.
“The illegitimate limitations, obligations, and punitive sanctions imposed on Russian demonstrators are absurd. It took 16 years and 13 instances of parliamentary tampering with legislation for the Russian authorities to render the right to peaceful assembly meaningless.”
Nine of the thirteen key legislative amendments used to restrict the right to peaceful assembly in Russia have been passed since 2014, as part of a crackdown on anti-government protests and human rights guaranteed by international human rights law and the Russian Constitution.
Local governments have adopted federal legislation’s pattern of imposing new limits on peaceful assembly. These shifts have encouraged both the police and the criminal justice system, with cops employing increasingly harsh tactics to quiet nonviolent protestors and the courts imposing harsh fines.
In its current version, the law’s protest requirements have grown longer and more restrictive. People convicted of “crimes against the constitutional order, state security, social safety, or social order” or protest-related administrative offenses more than once in a 12-month period, for example, are prohibited from organizing any public gathering.
Assemblies are prohibited from taking place near courthouses, jails, presidential homes, and, as of December 2020, emergency services. Regional legislation, on the other hand, makes these restrictions even stricter: in Kirov Oblast, for example, local law prohibits any gatherings near cultural, educational, medical, or entertainment facilities, shopping malls, playgrounds, and even public transportation stops – in other words, virtually anywhere in towns. Unplanned, or spontaneous, gatherings are universally prohibited and dispersed with excessive force when they happen.
Washington Center For Human Rights urges Russia’s authorities to modify national laws and practices in order to bring them into compliance with the country’s constitution and international human rights responsibilities. Authorities must also accept spontaneous peaceful assemblies, which should be regarded legal