Freedom House, a US-based NGO monitoring the progress or restriction of human freedoms as it perceives them around the globe, has published its most recent Freedom on the Net 2012 report, the third in its series. This edition assesses Internet and digital media in 47 countries over a period spanning January 2011 and May 2012.
In its findings, the NGO reassigns Russia its prior status as “partly free” and warns that the country is on a list of seven nations “at particular risk of suffering setbacks related to Internet freedom in late 2012 and 2013.”
With an unchanged report-on-report score of 52 – a rating falling between the most free (0-30) and the least free (61-100) countries – Russia ranks far behind its geographical neighbor Ukraine, which is considered free, and only nine points ahead of the first “not free” country on the NGO’s list of 47, Thailand.
Freedom House believes that in Russia, the Internet is still “a relatively unobstructed domain of free expression” – in clear contrast with the much more heavily controlled environment of traditional media. Russian TV, radio and print outlets are assumed to have been brought to heel over the past decade and are now described in Freedom House’s parallel Freedom of the Press 2012 study as “not free,” joining the mass media of four other former USSR constituent states – Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Belarus and Uzbekistan.
This gap “reflects the potential pressures in both the short and long term on the space for online expression,” according to the American NGO.
On the policy front, regulations governing the .rf and .ru domains were revised last November, enabling law enforcement agencies to seize a domain without a court order. In a set of examples of how this has told on the Internet, Freedom House lists the seizure by the Federal Drug Control Service on February 3, 2012 of the domain of Rylkov-fond.ru, the Rylkov Foundation website that has criticized Russia’s drug trafficking situation. That very month the Federal Security Service (FSB) reportedly requisitioned FSB21.ru, in what the US NGO feels was a move to quash criticism by that domain.
A number of cases have been reported of regional courts in Russia ruling to block websites that expose local corruption or confront local officials.
Since May 2012 a number of legislative measures have been taken in Russia to stop the Internet from serving as a platform for public debate that is “relatively uncensored.” The State Duma (parliament) has passed a law to recriminalize defamation and expanded the blacklisting of websites that legislators claim violate a vaguely defined concept of “extremism.”
Prominent bloggers such as Alexei Navalny, the founder of Rospil.ru – an irritating website to certain government officials because of its anti-corruption stance – can face detention and dubious prosecutions. Freedom House learned that United Russia, the party in power, had made plans to “invest nearly $320,000 to discredit Navalny, including through a possible scheme to disseminate compromising videos using a Navalny look-alike.”
While some of the earlier government stratagems – including harassing and jailing opposition activists, hacking blogs and deploying massive DDoS attacks – continued to occur over the reporting period, the state’s tactics have apparently changed somewhat of late, tending most recently towards indirect harassment of activists’ families and loved ones and thwarting opposition plans by employing well-paid pro-government commentators to skillfully manipulate Internet discussions.
In its conclusion, Freedom House estimates that with the obvious worsening of “the Kremlin’s contentious relationship with civil society” and the country’s preparations for regional elections in October, Internet controls “appear likely to increase.”
