Press Release, 17.01.2023

Photo by Emin Jafarov / Kommersant

The Yabloko party has prepared a third, updated version of the Register of Repressive Laws in the Russian Federation, which has been maintained by Yabloko experts since 2019. Today it includes 62 legal acts: federal and regional laws, as well as presidential decrees.

The criteria for entering a law into the Register of repressive laws are based on an assessment of one of the respectful international or Russian structures, rather than evaluative political judgments. Such structures include the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and the UN Human Rights Committee, the European Court of Human Rights, the Venice Commission, the Commissioner for Human Rights in the Russian Federation and the Human Rights Council under the President of the Russian Federation.

The third edition of the Register includes 62 laws, four more laws were added to it. Among them are the laws adopted in March 2022, referred to by the UN Human Rights Committee as “unreasonably restricting freedom of expression” (see the “Concluding observations on the 8th periodic report of the Russian Federation” of 20 October 2022). Such laws include the so-called “law on fakes”, and the “law on discrediting the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation”.

In addition, basing on the same comments by UN experts, the Register also includes a law adopted in the summer 2022, which supplemented the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation with Article 275.1 “Cooperation on a confidential basis with a foreign state, international or foreign organisation”. The UN Human Rights Committee finds it wording unreasonably broad and vague.

Alexander Gnezdilov, a member of the Federal Political Committee of the Yabloko party, stressed that the situation with rights and freedoms in Russia continues to deteriorate rapidly, which is reflected in the assessments of international organisations. He notes that “Earlier, the same UN Human Rights Committee, when referring to specific laws of the Russian Federation, usually simply expressed concern (or serious concern) in connection with their enforcement. In the 2022 report, experts from the United Nations, almost for the first time, found it necessary to directly indicate that a number of laws need to be repealed, just in their entirety. That is, this is no longer a question of the arbitrary interpretation of laws by the authorities, but a question of laws that, according to the UN Committee, are initially, fundamentally anti-legal in their nature”.

Gnezdilov also noted that the President and the parliament have adopted in recent months a number of other legislative acts that have very high chances to be included into to the fourth edition of the Yabloko’s Register.