Darya Kostromina. "Criminal prosecutions for terrorism in Russia and abuses by the state. A series of surveys, part 3. Statements in support of Terrorism"

Prosecution for ‘reposting’ (a video, a song, the expression of thoughts, and so on) can at the same time be prosecution for ‘terrorism.’ Our third survey on the unlawful use of terrorism law in Russia looks, in particular, at Article 205.2 of the Russian Criminal Code that deals with incitement of terrorism, and justification and propaganda of terrorism. This survey describes, among other things, key features of prosecutions for statements in support of terrorism on the Internet:

- statistically they make up approximately one third of all ‘anti-terrorism’ convictions;

- they are comfortably taking over from the struggle against extremism, which is no longer fashionable;

- the penalties are more severe than for the murder of several people, in cases where a person has lost control of themselves;

- they also deal with incitement to revolution.

Since we finished writing this survey, such a large number of new prosecutions under Article 205.2 has become known that, if we wanted to include them all, we would have to rewrite the survey almost every day and it would never be published. For example, the survey does not include the cases of Svetlana Prokopieva or Pavel Zlomnov, although their cases clearly fall within the tendencies we describe. The survey is available for you to read on our website.