More than 1,800 instances of the government-led abuse of Russian Internet users’ rights for unrestricted access to web-based information last year were brought to light in a muckraking report issued last week by a Russian civil rights group.
Agora, an interregional association of Russian civil rights NGOs set up in 2005 to bring together lawyers from regions as diverse as Tatarstan and Chuvashia in the Volga area and Chita in Siberia, claims in its annual report “Internet Freedom in 2013: Assault by the Guards” that the repressive trend is alarming, and that bloggers are not only censured but also beaten up and even murdered in Russia.
“During the year 2013, the Russian authorities laid the regulative and law enforcement foundation for the decrease of Russian Internet growth and development. It will affect not only the users but Internet-based businesses too,” the report reads.
Out of a total of 1,832 abusive instances in 2013 – a dramatic increase from 1,197 a year before – Pavel Chikov and Damir Gainutdinov, the two Agora lawyers that put together the report, found that at least one life had been taken in an effort to squash Internet freedom.
Other cases of alleged misdemeanor included 226 criminal prosecutions of Internet users (nearly double from the previous year, with at least 30 instances of charges pressed against users in VKontakte, Russia’s number one social network), 514 instances of direct or oblique government pressure, 236 cases of limited access to websites, 63 government-orchestrated cyber attacks, and 37 lawsuits against bloggers.
Agora’s “map of Internet freedom violations” suggests that many regions across the country are involved.
In 23 physical assaults on bloggers and web-based journalists which led to wounds and serious injuries across Russia, police officers were directly instrumental in six instances.
Most abuses last year (180) occurred in Moscow, a 100% increase from the previous year. In Russia’s second largest city, St. Petersburg, the statistics skyrocketed from 14 in 2012 to 48 last year. In the Muslim region of Dagestan, abuses swelled from a near-negligible two cases in 2012 to 15 in 2013, Agora underscored. The most upsetting growth rate was found in the Kostroma region some 340km north-east of Moscow, with its stats jumping from zero in 2012 to 31 last year.
Stepping up efforts to pull the strings
The number of proposals by politicians to keep the lid on the Web reached 75 – a 1.5-time rise from 2012 and a vault from just five in 2011.
The Federal Law #187- FZ, popularly known as anti-piracy law, was passed in July 2013 to become what Agora emphasizes is an “extrajudicial mechanism” of indiscriminately blocking websites. This “threatens the integrity and operation of the Internet,” the NGO states – a claim many industry observers may perceive as an exaggeration.
In excess of 3,300 instances of legitimate or quasi-legitimate blocking of what the Russian government had defined as “outlawed content” were identified in the Agora report. The Unified Register, a government portal launched in November 2012, raises red flags for law enforcement agencies to jam ‘bad websites’ listed there – even without a court order.
In other instances, however, the regulator Roskomnadzor did not block websites in the absence of a judge’s ruling, East-West Digital News noted.
Chikov and Gainutdinov also mentioned more ‘benign’ legislative initiatives, starting from that of Patriarch Kirill of Russian Orthodoxy from January 6, 2013 when he proposed to toughen the liability for offences against the believers’ feelings, and all the way through to December 25 when Representative Degtyarev suggested that the list of grounds for extrajudicial blocking be extended to include instructions on how to commit a rape.
“Russia has preserved the status of one of the main promoters of the conservative policy in the field of Internet regulation on the international stage, however opting for a relatively mild version of control,” the lawyers wrote, referring to the filtering and blocking of content.
In a conclusion, the authors said they expected the above practices to continue and involve more and more of the extrajudicial blocking of information and use of new technical facilities to improve control and tracing. They also feel that authorities will attempt this year to drive a wedge into the relatively unified web-based activist environment to break it down to “closed national segments.”
