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GLASNOST DEFENSE FOUNDATION'S DIGEST No. 298 (September 25, 2006) GLASNOST DEFENSE FOUNDATION'S DIGEST Editor-in-chief: Alexei Simonov. Editorial board: Boris Timoshenko - Monitoring Service chief, Pyotr Polonitsky - Regional Network coordinator, Vsevolod Shelkhovskoy - translator, Alexander Efremov - website administrator in charge of Digest distribution. We appreciate the support of the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Digest released once a week, on Mondays, since
August 11, 2000. TOPIC OF THE WEEK EVENT OF THE WEEK RUSSIA GLASNOST DEFENSE FOUNDATION OUR PUBLICATIONS OUR PARTNERS
Russia deemed dangerous to journalists. The international Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has published the results of a survey putting Russia third on the list of countries with the largest numbers of journalists killed over the past 15 years. On the CPJ list, Russia is preceded by Iraq with 78 and Algeria with 60 reporters killed, and followed by Columbia (37), the Philippines (29), India (22), Bosnia (19), Turkey (18), and Rwanda, Sierra-Leone and Tajikistan with 16 journalists murdered in each of the three latter countries. Between January 1, 1992 and August 15, 2006, a total of 580 reporters died a violent death worldwide. In 85 percent of the cases, the killers have never been found and go unpunished. Nina Ognyanova, coordinator of the CPJ Europe and Central Asia Program who contributed the statistics on Russia, has told the newspaper Gazeta that in the course of investigation it was established that murder facts had systematically been hushed up: "We have found out that 12 murders of journalists in Russia have remained undisclosed since 2000, with the authorities giving zero comments on those. Suspects have been detained and released with the victims' families never getting any information. First linked with reporters' professional performance, the killings were later identified as robbery cases." According to Ms. Ognyanova, the Office of the RF Prosecutor General often finds it hard to admit that a killing was a preordered one: "They would have in that event to officially pledge to find the person who ordered the murder, which is extremely difficult to do in Russia." The Glasnost Defense Foundation's statistics on the number of killed reporters are different from those announced by the CPJ (see http://www.gdf.ru/arh/mort/index.shtml). For details about progress in the investigation of violent assaults on journalists, see the "Excerpts from GDF Correspondence with RF Prosecutor General's Office" series posted on the GDF News Line at http://www.gdf.ru/.
Public Chamber grants awarded. The Public Chamber Council has announced a list of non-profit public organizations selected for receipt of Chamber-awarded grants. When approved by President Putin, the list will open up a new source of funding for NPOs, which is very encouraging. However, the process of summing up the results of this competition for the right to be financed from the federal budget threw into bold relief some very exciting details. It turned out that the total amount of RUR 250,000,000 vied for by more than 2,000 non-profit organizations will be distributed among the 516 lucky ones selected by the Public Chamber Council. Of these, there are 17 organizations involving the Chamber's own members, as Elena Zelinskaya of the Media Union. Besides, support will be offered to organizations known to be loyal to the United Russia Party, among them Mediakratia (an affiliate of the same Media Union), the Public Projects Institute, and others. The amounts the contest winners are to receive have not been specified because Jury Chairman Sergey Katyrin believes that disclosing this kind of information would be "unethical". Actually, the question is how much the Chosen Seventeen will get, because the rest will only have to do collectively with what is left. Speaking about ethics. The practice of awarding grants to members of one's own team looks odd indeed. Lev Ponomaryov, executive director of the All-Russia Human Rights Movement, has noted in this connection that "it would be hard to imagine heads of a western foundation awarding grants to themselves". As far as the Public Chamber's money distributors are concerned, they do not seem to regard it as a problem. Moreover, the criteria for identifying the winners remain unclear. According
to Kommersant, though, contenders had to prove they have "a record
of fruitful cooperation with government agencies" - something actually
unthinkable for Open Russia in contrast to, say, the Union of Orthodox
Believers. 1. Ivanovo. Court hearings of "phallic symbol" case continue. (Continued from Digest 281, see http://www.gdf.ru/digest/digest/digest281.shtml#tema). The Leninsky District Court in Ivanovo has opened hearings of the case of Vladimir Rakhmankov, editor of the web magazine Kursiv, accused under Article 319 of the RF Penal Code of insulting the Russian president by publishing a May 18 article entitled "Putin as Russia's Phallic Symbol". The article contained ironical comments on one of the points of the president's
address to the Federal Assembly - about the need to boost the birth rate
in Russia. Specifically, the author cited a gubernatorial press service
report about the recent rise in the local Zoo of the reproduction rate
of ponies, lynxes and other animals, and drew the conclusion that the
animals "were quick to respond to the presidential call". Seeing
that as an insult to President Putin, the regional prosecutor's office
rushed to initiate criminal proceedings. The question arises as to what the Orthodox Church has to do with it at all. Russia's judiciary is known to be strictly secular. Or has something changed of late? But then, Mr. Rakhmankov would have felt even worse if the lady "expert" had chosen to study the controversial publication's content in the light of, say, Islamic Fundamentalism…
In the town of Berezniki on September 21, security guards from the private security services company "Sheriff" stopped a truck carrying 70,000 copies of the newspaper Vechernyaya Perm slated for distribution in the territory's north. Without explaining the reasons for the newspaper's arrest, they called a police patrol which escorted the truck to the nearest police station. The town police chief has given no comment on the incident, either. According to Vyacheslav Vakhrin, a member of the regional Legislative Assembly, the newspaper may have been arrested because that day's issue contained materials criticizing the Perm governor, Oleg Chirkunov. This confiscation is not the first one since this year began. Last March, law enforcers arrested Vechernyaya Perm on orders from the town's Election Committee (for details, see http://www.gdf.ru/digest/digest/digest270.html#rus2). The conflict culminated at the time in the regional prosecutor Alexander Kondalov's making a representation that called on the regional police chief Yuri Gorlov to put an end to "impermissible law violations testifying to your failure to duly fulfill your professional functions, and smearing the law enforcement agencies in the eyes of the public".
Court hearings are over in Gorno-Altaisk of the case of A. Kubashev, former head of the republican government's Information Policy Committee, who was accused under Article 144.2 of the RF Penal Code of abusing his official position to interfere with lawful journalistic activities. Legal proceedings against Mr. Kubashev were instituted in April 2005 after the editors of two Altai newspapers, Zvezda Altaya and Altaidyn Cholmony, complained that he had urged them to publish only positive reports about the republic's government and president, while hushing up the poor performance of a group of local lawmakers. In May 2006, Kubashev was fully acquitted in court in view of no corpus delicti, but the republican prosecutor's office appealed to a higher-standing judicial authority. Finally, the Gorno-Altaisk Town Court canceled the primary court's acquitting sentence and found Mr. Kubashev guilty of interfering with lawful journalistic activities, sentencing him to a suspended 10-month term of imprisonment with a 1-year probation period and a ban on Kubashev's employment as a government serviceman for the next 12 months.
By Anatoly Tsygankov, Two weeks ago, investigator Sergey Sorokin of the Lahdenpoh district prosecutor's office with a group of policemen attempted to storm into the district administration headquarters. They succeeded in breaking into some of the offices, among them the accounting office whose staffers were ordered out. Naturally, the news about the "seizure of the administration building" went around instantly. After the previous events in Kondopoga no one was really shocked, and some suggested a repetition of the Kondopoga "law enforcement" operation might be taking place. Natalya Vladimirskaya, editor of the district newspaper Prizyv, working in a business-as-usual manner, was taking photo pictures of what was going on when investigator Sorokin clamped down on her, trying to tear away her camera. He did so in spite of the frantic resistance the lady offered, leaving her with a trauma. As a result, the camera was broken and Ms. Sorokina was compelled to request medical assistance. It is still unclear why the visitors decided to take the mayor's office by storm instead of entering it easily and without excessive noise. Some believe it may be part of preparations for the district leader's election scheduled to be held in Lahdenpoh in October, with the incumbent mayor, M. Maximov, running against a United Russia Party nominee. The incident will be investigated by higher-standing authorities. Meanwhile, the Karelian Journalists' Union will be urging the law enforcers to launch a separate investigation into the assault on Natalya Vladimirskaya whom a local prosecutor's office serviceman attempted to forcibly prevent from doing her professional work.
According to the police, Channel 41 correspondent Vyacheslav Plotnikov, reported missing since last June, has been found dead in a forest near Otrozhki Lake in the Zheleznodorozhny District of Voronezh. With no knife or bullet wounds, nor traces of stifling found on the TV reporter's body, forensic experts are now busy trying to identify the cause of Mr. Plotnikov's death. So far, there are no reasons to believe he was murdered. The journalist's body was found far from the place of his residence. The police have established that a week before his death he was taken to a hospital near Otrozhki from which he escaped without the doctors' permission a few days later. The report about his disappearance was filed at about the same time he died. Still, colleagues believe Mr. Plotnikov may have been killed; they want the law enforcement agencies to investigate the circumstances of his death with utmost care. [Newsru.com report of September 25]
GDF seminar held in Krasnodar Territory. By Pyotr Polonitsky, Another GDF seminar in the series "The Press & Government: Opportunities for Cooperation in the Media Area", held at Sputnik Hotel in Sochi on September 15-16, brought together journalists and government officials from the Kuban River area, Stavropol, Rostov-on-Don, Volgograd, Daghestan, Chechen Republic and some other regions united within Russia's Southern Federal District. The seminar was organized and co-sponsored by European Commission representatives in Moscow and the Krasnodar Territory administration. The first-day events included reports by Dr. V. Monakhov, professor of the UNESCO Copyright Department; Dr. A. Ostashevsky, Ph.D. (Philology) , professor of Kuban State University; Dr. I. Dzyaloshinsky, Ph.D. (Philology), director of the Institute of Communicavistics; A. Melnikov, advisor to the Governor of Krasnodar; E. Logvinova, member of the Territorial Election Committee, and other speakers. Heated debates flared up over how to develop an efficient information policy for the Kuban River area by the concerted efforts of executive and representative branches; participants identified the most controversial (as seen by the opponents) methods of promoting government cooperation with the media. On the following day, GDF President Alexei Simonov described the specifics of government-media interaction in other Russian regions, illustrating his speech by the results of GDF analysis of media and journalists' rights violations monitoring throughout the Russian Federation. A general discussion yielded a set of recommendations on how to optimize the media's relations with government authorities with due regard for the geographical and historical specifics, as well as traditions, of the Krasnodar Territory.
Printed word: lighter than an Internet phrase? By Roman Zakharov, The Oktyabrsky Federal Court in St. Petersburg sentenced Yuri Belyayev on August 29 to a suspended 18-month term of imprisonment with a probation period of equal duration - only for posting his xenophobic calls on a number of websites not registered as media outlets - and disregarded his analogous publications on the pages of NNN. The nationalist groups accepted that as a small victory, concluding that the print media must be "immune" to legal prosecution for "telling the truth about non-Russians". Even in St. Petersburg, which has turned over the past few years into a major center of "patriotic" (i.e., nationalist) activity, the official version - that the legal proceedings were terminated because of the statute of limitation - is considered untrustworthy: the law enforcement agencies officially identified some NNN publications as xenophobic as recently as in 2004. Until last August, the city prosecutor's office had repeatedly declined to initiate legal proceedings against the editors or authors of nationalist publications in spite of insistent calls by human rights defenders and activists of liberal public associations and parties. But it readily convicted a man who had posted some threatening web statements addressed to Governor Valentina Matviyenko in person - although everybody, including the judges, acknowledged that those statements were akin to curse and posed no real danger. It turns out that the power system, including its judicial branch, sees Internet-based threats to individual government officials as a bigger problem than the "patriotic" print media's incessant calls to "do away" with non-Russians.
Committee to Protect Journalists demands an end to Vladimir Rakhmankov's prosecution. The international Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is urging the Russian authorities to stop the criminal and judicial prosecution of Vladimir Rakhmankov, editor-in-chief of the web newspaper Kursiv based in the city of Ivanovo, the Moscow Echo radio station has reported with reference to the CPJ. "Prosecutors must not use criminal law to protect public figures from the media's attention," CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon said, adding that satire is deemed a necessary and significant element of any democracy.
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