“The deputies of pro-governmental factions propose considerable reductions in the number of mass media employees recognised as journalists with all the attenuating consequences for their professional activity.”This was Sergei Ivanenko’s assessment of the amendments to the law “On the Mass Media” proposed by a group of deputies from the “Unity” and LDPR factions and the “People’s deputy” group.

Ivanenko said that liquidation of Article 52 of the law is especially dangerous, as this article clearly states that freelance writers also possess the status of journalist. “It is well-known that

mainly freelance staff work in Chechnya. Depriving them of the status of journalist would mean that there would be absolutely no free information from this region,” stressed Ivanenko.

He also said that the constitutional formulation on the ban on calls to change the constitutional order of the state (Article 4 of the law), which is effective for every citizen of the RF, for journalists is changed to “incitement to a change in the constitutional order” may have dramatic consequences. “This is reminiscent of the ideology of objective guilt a la Vyshinsky (Ed. Public Prosecutor in Stalin’s USSR), when a person was indicted on the consequences of his actions rather than on the basis of his actions,” added Ivanenko.

Ivanenko is convinced that these dubious proposals represent “a corner stone, if not a position of the executive authority cast by the Kremlin to gain an impression of the general attitude to the systematic attack on freedom of speech in Russia.”

Ivanenko thinks that society should raise an alarm and draw public attention to these issues. “I don’t think that these draft laws in their

present wording have any chance of passing through parliament. However, here they are applying a strategy which can be summed up as “constant tinkering to erode the stone”. Slight amendments restricting journalists’ rights and freedom of speech are introduced into one law, and then into another one, and then one day we will wake up in a different country,” stressed Ivanenko.