Press release, 16.08.2019

After violent beatings of peaceful protesters in Moscow by masked police officers, Boris Vishnevsky, head of the Yabloko faction in the Legislative Assembly of St. Petersburg, proposed to “deanonimise” law enforcement officers by placing their individual numbers on uniforms and helmets of police and the Russian Guard officers during public events that allows to identify them.

Vishnevsky to introduce corresponding amendments into federal laws on the police and the national guard. Boris Vishnevsky has already sent the bill with amendments to the legal department of the St. Petersburg parliament for their assessment – so that after receiving the conclusion of the legal department St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly could propose this legislative initiative to the State Duma.

In addition, the head of the Yabloko faction proposed that Vladimir Lukin, member of the Federation Council, former Commissioner for Human Rights in Russia and one of the founders of Yabloko, also support the bill.

“Like all normal people, I am extremely indignant at the arbitrarily rule of the law enforcement who beat and maim civilians during the protests. And they almost always go unpunished because they are anonymous – they cannot be identified,” Boris Vishnevsky said.

The head of the Yabloko faction in the Legislative Assembly of St. Petersburg also stressed that the law on the abolition of anonymity of security forces is needed for citizens who should have the right to establish who beat or detained them, in order to verify the legitimacy of these actions and punishment if violations of the law are found.

According to Boris Vishnevsky, the police and the Russian Guard also need the law, so that only those officers who really violated the law are liable, and also for avoiding the emergence of provocateurs who put on police or the Russian Guard uniforms without identifying marks, in order to provoke riots or retaliatory violence.

It should be noted that participants of several protest rallies against non-registration of independent candidates in the Moscow City Duma election faced the use of unjustified violence by police and the Russian Guard. In the vast majority of cases, the faces of law enforcement officers who were breaking the law were hidden under masks, and there were no tokens with identification numbers. The videos of the detention of Daria Sosnovskaya by the Russian Guard officers at the Moscow rally on August 10 were widely discussed as one of the law enforcement officers hit her in the liver. The petition demanding the large numbers are made on police uniform gained over 140,000 signatures.