Press Release, 9.11.2020

Photo: Maxim Kruglov, head of the Yabloko faction in the Moscow City Duma, detained during a single picket in support of arrested journalist Ilya Azar, 1 June 2020.

The Bureau of the Yabloko Party sent appeals to Public Prosecutor General Igor Krasnov and Interior Minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev demanding to protect participants in single pickets.

In Moscow alone, since the beginning of the pandemic, several hundred participants in single pickets have been detained. Dozens of people were detained during the same period in St. Petersburg. Lawyers were not allowed to see some of the detained picket participants in the police stations.

The appeal, signed by the Chairman of the party Nikolai Rybakov, emphasises that single pickets represent a constitutional right of citizens, with the help of which they can quickly express their position on urgent issues.

Yabloko’s appeal also states that detention of picketers, who are holding their action not all together simultaneously, but successively replacing each other, violates the legal position of the Constitutional and the Supreme Court.

“Taking into account the role of single pickets as an important mechanism of direct democracy, the authorities and their representatives should act as their conscientious and effective defenders of picketers rather than limit the rights of pickets participants. However, the authorities do not fulfill this task,” Rybakov notes.

In view of this, the Yabloko party demands the following:

– take measures of public prosecutor’s and internal ministry’s response aimed at stopping unlawful detentions of participants in single pickets;

– provide citizens with the opportunity to freely hold single pickets on urgent issues of public and political life;

– not to allow the police to be assigned the function of combating dissent;

– in case of violation of the rights of citizens to conduct single pickets, take immediate measures of the public prosecutor’s and internal ministry’s response.