Darya Kostromina. "Criminal prosecutions for terrorism in Russia and abuses by the state. A series of surveys, part 1. How the system was created"

Terrorism is one of the very worst labels that the contemporary Russian state uses in its conduct of political repression. What distinguish fabricated prosecutions for terrorism from other fabricated criminal cases are the severity of the punishments, the lack of transparency and the efforts to minimalize public support. 2018 is not the first year we have witnessed this state of affairs.

Darya Kostromina, a staff member at the Memorial Human Rights Centre who works on the Progamme for the Support of Political Prisoners, has prepared a series of surveys about the unlawful application of anti-terrorism articles of the Russian Criminal Code. The First Survey is entitled ‘Criminal prosecutions for terrorism in Russia and abuses by the state: how the system was created.’

The issues considered by the survey include:

— the increase in the number of articles of the Russian Criminal Code dealing with terrorism;
— the increase in the number of convictions for terrorism: over the past five years these have increased approximately by a factor of ten;
 — the creation of a uniform system for terrorism prosecutions;
 — the classification of calls for revolution as terrorism.

Our next survey will deal with the prosecutions related to the Islamic organisation, Hizb ut-Tahrir al-Islami

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