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From Friederike Behr In Nizhny Novgorod
Russia respects the right to freedom of assembly – for once.
Yesterday I witnessed something rather unusual. I was in Niznhy Novgorod – a few hundred kilometres East of Moscow. About a hundred people, including Amnesty International members, gathered peacefully on Nizhnii Novgorod’s Freedom Square for a meeting and then walked about a kilometre with the Russian Constitution in their hands. The whole event lasted about one and a half hours.
Nothing unusual in this you might think. But only one month ago, several demonstrators were detained and some sentenced to up to five days in police detention for doing precisely what they did yesterday. It is this – the disruption of protests and the arrest of demonstrators – that is usual in Russia.
This was the fate of similar demonstrations yesterday in support of the freedom of assembly that took place in Moscow and St. Petersburg, where around fifty and fifteen people respectively were detained. According to the press service of the Moscow city police, the demonstrators were obstructing traffic and preventing people going about their normal business in the city. In both cities, the action calling for respect for the right to freedom of assembly lasted no more than a few minutes before the police intervened and took activists away to different police stations.
Well-known political activist Sergei Udaltsov, leader of the Left Front, was detained on 29 August, when he and a few other people held a sanctioned meeting outside the Central Election Commission, in Moscow. The reason? More than the ten “authorised” people turned up. Sergei Udaltsov is no stranger to such arrests. Over the last year he has been detained at least a dozen times and has spent several months in police detention, each time for allegedly disobeying lawful police orders and for breaches of the law on public meetings.
Further afield, near Tuapse, on the Black Sea coast, three of a handful of demonstrators were detained on 27 August when they tried to walk along a beach, protesting against construction projects which will block free access to the sea. The protesters tried to argue with the police, stating that the territory they were walking on was designated for public use and should not have been sold off for private development. To no avail. One of the arrested protesters, Viktor Chirikov, was sentenced to 15 days police detention, the other two to five days – for resisting the police. Reportedly, a police officer beat Viktor Chirikov and threw him to the ground when he tried to take photos of the action.
Video and photo material from many of these peaceful events show police acting with excessive force while far outnumbering protesters. I have witnessed many occasions myself over the past year where police fail to allow protestors any time to obey a lawful order before detaining them. The more prominent the activist, the more likely this is to happen - Eduard Limonov from The Other Russia and Sergei Udaltsov are regularly detained, often within minutes of appearing at a place for a planned demonstration.
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