08 March 2022
Time: 17:00-18:30 (Helsinki time)
Via Zoom
Registration:
Please register for the event via this form: https://forms.gle/rsuWWmvBkcELQSZU9
Event Description:
Gender plays a significant role in the rhetoric of war and peace. With ongoing Russian aggression against Ukraine, Marianna Muravyeva and three women scholars, specialists in masculinities, gender studies, women’s history, and feminist politics discuss how anti-gender campaigns, traditional values rhetoric and toxic militarised masculinities in both Russia and Ukraine worked in the past wars and conflicts and what is their role today in this current war.
Jeffrey Kahn will talk about the role for international institutions to play in stopping Russian aggression against Ukraine. He will provide a historical outlook and speak on the role of the UN and its bodies (HR Council, ICJ), ICC, the CoE and ECtHR.
Martti Koskenniemi will talk about international law instruments and safeguards and their efficiency to prevent violations of sovereignty and military invasions in relation to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The recording of the talk will be available on our webpage after the event.
Event Description:
Martti Koskenniemi will talk about international law instruments and safeguards and their efficiency to prevent violations of sovereignty and military invasions in relation to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The recording of the talk will be available on our webpage after the event.
Russian Law has been changing rapidly in the past decade. Last year, the year of the pandemic, Russia had its first constitutional reform since 1993 with constitutional amendments having a profound impact on the present and future of the country. Following the Constitution, other legislation has been amended to further cement the path to an authoritarian sovereignty and neoconservative ideologies. Aiming to provide introductory information of these changes, discuss their impact in depth, provide an analysis of law and its influence on society, politics, economics and environment, the Development of Russian Law program continues the Russian Law Talks series. Every month, we will invite experts and scholars from various disciplines and sectors to discuss the most important and current events in the Russian Legal life.
Last year we had many interesting discussions with multiple experts in the field. We discussed Protection of Foreign Investment in Russia, Foreign Agents 2.0: Civil Society, New Legislation on the NGOs and Educational Activities in Russia, Gender and Protest in Russia and The Arctic Environment, Sounds, and Posthuman Laws.Get inspired by our previous experts ranging from scholars, legal counsel, NGO representatives and watch the talks here.
We are looking for experts and scholars from a variety of disciplines and new current topics to discuss. Grab your collaborators and register yourself for our discussions, we would love to hear from you and delve further into the current events of Russian legal world. If you are interested in joining us, please register via this link.
If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us at drl.program@gmail.com. We look forward to more important and fruitful discussions with you!
Development of Russian Law XIII: Legal Diversity And Regional Encounters – Recordings now available
The DRL XIII Conference was held on October 19 – 20, 2021, Helsinki, Finland
Recordings of the two keynotes, as well as most of the parallel sessions are available to be viewed either directly on Unitube or through individual links on the program page of the official DRL XIII website.
Free University Moscow is announcing its Fall courses. Among those is “Soviet Law, Its Origins, and Development (1917-1948)”, taught by Anna Lukina, a PhD student at the University of Cambridge. The course is going to examine the way the concepts of the law and state evolved during the first thirty years of the Soviet state, focusing on the intersections of revolution and evolution, politics and law, and terror and legality in the light of a detailed examination of primary and secondary sources. The course syllabus in English and Russian, as well as other information about the course, can be found here.
The course will be taught online in two groups – in English and Russian. Knowledge of Russian is not a prerequisite.
The course is free, but students are welcome to make a small donation to the Free University Moscow.
An essay of no more than 500 words replying to a prompt ‘Soviet law: an oxymoron?’. Essays would be assessed based on the following criteria: (i) focus on the question answered; (ii) quality of argumentation; (iii) structure; and (iv) originality.
You will find out whether your application has been successful within two weeks after the application deadline.
On 19 September 2021 Russians will go to polls to elect 450 members of State Duma, the lower house of parliament. Although it wields little real political power, elections to the Duma always had outsize importance. They test the ability of local authorities to ‘deliver’ results for the federal center and also gauge public opinion without resulting in real change. The period before elections tends to bring both heightened repression and increased welfare spending to scare and bribe the electorate. This year is no exception. A slate of new repressive laws has been adopted in the past month to specifically target the supporters of imprisoned regime critic Alexey Navalny, who encourages tactical voting. Several opposition figures have already been arrested or forced out of the country. The upcoming election also seems to discourage any pressure on citizens to improve the currently lagging Covid-19 vaccination rate. A technical innovation is the rollout of electronic voting in several regions, despite remaining concerns over its security from fraud. The experts will discuss these and other themes related to the upcoming election.
Speakers:
Dmitry Kurnosov, Carlsberg Fellow at the University of Helsinki Dmitry Kurnosov studies how the election jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights impacts the development of law, resolution of electoral disputes and election administration in Finland, Denmark, and several Post-Soviet countries. He holds a PhD in Law from the University of Copenhagen. Prior to becoming a researcher, Dmitry has for several years been a Deputy Spokesperson of the Russian Constitutional Court.
Margarita Zavadskaya, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki
Margarita Zavadskaya’s research focuses on how perceived electoral malpractice affects electoral turnout and other politically relevant outcomes, and how Russian voters consume and process political information translated by the media. This is studied through a series of survey experiments. Margarita Zavadskaya defended her PhD dissertation, “When Elections Subvert Authoritarianism: Failed Co-optation and Russian Post-Electoral Protests of 2011-12”, in the European University Institute, Florence in 2017.
Vitaly Averin, Member of the Federal Council of the Golos Movement
Vitaly Averin coordinates regional election monitors at Golos, Russia’s largest civic election observation movement. Golos has been monitoring elections since 2000, drawing the ire of the authorities. After several court decisions against the organization, Golos was forced to dissolve, but reconstituted itself as a civic movement.
Gender aspects of violations of the right to freedom of assembly in Russia: first observations and quantitative data
Denis Shedov, Natasha Smirnova \ OVD-Info
Text is based on the discussion on the seminar ‘Russian Law Talks 2 – Gender and Protest’, which was held on the 8th of March 2021. The relevant slides are available here.
Gender and Protest in Russia
The right to freedom of peaceful assembly is dramatically limited in Russia. Since 2011, the human rights media project OVD-Info has been monitoring detentions at peaceful assemblies and cases of political persecution in Russia.
In 2020, in connection with the UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of peaceful assembly and association’s request for contributions to his report about women and protest, we published our first review on the persecution of women for exercising the right to freedom of assembly in Russia from early 2010 to mid-2020. Since then we have been monitoring women’s participation in the protests which intensified during the mass protests of January-February 2021.
Over the years we have documented explicit exploiting gender roles or even sexism regarding protesters when arrested, while at police stations and when their actions get evaluated for criminal charges.
The comments or statements by the police officers who use explicitly gendered or sexist remarks to marginalize participants of the protest or the protest itself. In 2019 while detaining a woman during the mass arrests in the summer protests, a police officer noticed a ring on her finger and said that she was a married woman who was not to go to protests and that her husband had to spank her for that. Similar examples regarding both female and male which we collected in the special chapter of our report, confirm gender bias of the police.
Threats of violence are gender-specific. An intersex women detained during a public event in Makhachkala in 2019 described her experience, “At the station I was humiliated, threatened, verbally degraded in various ways, but not beaten. They threatened to reveal my status so that the locals would kill me, and threatened to murder me and blame it on the Wahhabis. They said they’d do that so that creatures like me would not exist. They forced me to undress; they examined me, and they conducted a lengthy interrogation regarding my genitals. It was extremely unpleasant.”
Criminal charges are gender biased. Zarifa Sautieva, an attendee of the 2018 Ingushetia protest, was charged with organisation of violence dangerous to the life and health of public officials carrying out official duties. According to the prosecutor’s version of what happened in her case, she “provocatively called to masculine dignity and national unity,” urging other protesters to protect the elders and the woman (Sautieva) by any means.
Many restriction of the freedom of assembly could be considered as deeply gendered: arbitrary refusal to authorize gatherings, suppression of rallies and mass arrests, use of force against detainees, state control over information regarding assemblies, administrative and criminal prosecution, threats, expulsions and other means of non-juridical pressure and so on.
Russian legislation is not gender neutral and has an impact on exercising of different rights and freedoms, particularly freedom of assembly. Some of the issues include:
Police officer is prohibited from using special means against women with visible signs of pregnancy;
In administrative prosecution, community service does not apply to pregnant women, women with children under the age of three;
Pregnant women and women with children under age of 14 cannot be sentenced to administrative arrest;
Women are not placed in colonies of strict and special regimes;
Men between the ages of 18 and 27 are subject to military service, which becomes additional means of pressure and creates the risk of being drafted if expelled from a university.
The majority of gender-specific provisions are based on women’s reproductive role and aimed at protecting her reproductive function which further objectifies women. However, not many of those provisions are implemented.
Participation of women in Navalny-related protests
In January and February 2021 Russia experienced mass protests in connection with the return and subsequent detention of Alexey Navalny. Women played a visible role in these protests.
According to estimates from Moscow and St. Petersburg protests conducted by a group of scientists including Alexey Zakharov, Alexandra Arkhipova and a number of volunteers from the project White Counter and the group of Contemporary folklore monitoring, women accounted for 45% of protesters on January 23 in Moscow and 44% in St. Petersburg. The share of women was lower on the former protests in Moscow: on August 3, 2019, 36% of all the participants were women.
In Moscow, according to OVD-Info’s data, more than 1500 people were detained on January 23, 12% of them were women.
The most common type of negative consequences for protesters is charges with an administrative offense. According to the case data, available on the court’s websites, since the beginning of the protests on the 17 of January 2021, 4515 cases were transferred to Moscow courts by March 4, 15% of them were against women and 85% — against men.
The most typical punishment for participation in the protests is a fine. The court hearing is preceded by the arrest after protesters had been detained.
Based on our analysis, in Moscow, the average fine for women was larger, and arrests on average shorter, than in cases against men. Surprisingly, according to this piece of data, arrests have been imposed on women even more often than on men. Though both women and men got arrested ten times more often than before: according to official court statistics, in 2019, when rallies with mass detentions took place in Moscow, the share of arrests was only 4% of all indictments.
In February, the Interior Ministry reported on the initiation of 90 criminal cases after mass protests. Among the suspects and accused in these cases, by the beginning of March, we have learnt that of 68 men and 12 women. That is an extraordinary number considering that from the year 2015 till the middle of 2020 there were only 8 criminal cases against women in Russia connected with rallies.
Among these 12 women, 5 were charged with violation of epidemiological rules — that article of the Criminal code was significantly changed last year and its enforcement seems to be gender-neutral.
On the contrary, women are rarely charged with violence against police officers, though that is the most common accusation for protesters. We know about only one such case against a woman after the January protests, and about only 3 such court verdicts since 2011 compared with 86 verdicts against men. Also, the penalties for women were milder than the average for similar cases against male protesters.
In 2021, the number of men injured during arrest was significantly higher than the number of women (90 vs 10%). Also, the cases of police violence towards male protesters seem not to contradict the existing social norm that much. Usually, the information spreads wider, and we see more reaction when women get injured, as the violence by a police officer, who is expected to be a strong man, towards a woman, who is expected to be weaker, is condemned and criticised by society.
Conclusion
We see a huge potential in studying how the state institutions prevent people from exercising their right to freedom of assembly through a gender perspective.
If limitations in this area differ for men and women, the research may reveal how gender specific tools of oppression work and suggest a way to deal with them. Also, it may show how gender inequality being entrenched in different spheres of life results in unequal access to freedom of assembly depending on the gender.
Looking deeper into the quantitative data presented above, it is possible to study the dynamic of changes, the regional aspects, variations for different types of events and protest topics, and focus not only on the gender of protesters but also of those who prevent them from protests and those who are involved in the defence of the freedom to assemble. Still more qualitative data is needed to study the influence of the position and responsibilities in the family on limitation of access to freedom of assembly.
Additionally, there is the context of special female experience of detention, escorting and prosecution, connected with misfit conditions and increased stigmatization, as well as the context of gender difference of participation in public and political life and recognition as a political entity. We believe that such context is necessary to interpret our data and get some knowledge about current social and legal life in Russia.
OVD-Info research team is ready to provide data and is open to conducting joint research on these topics.
To contact us, write to us at data@ovdinfo.org. You can also subscribe to OVD-Info data newsletter to get updates about our research and data HERE.
Russian Law Talks 2 – ‘Gender and Protest’ recording now available!
The seminar ‘Russian Law Talks 2 – Gender and Protest’ was held on the 8th of March 2021.
The original description of the event:
Since 2011 Russians are back on the streets expressing their opinion of the regime and protesting its new laws and measures. The authorities have chosen the path of criminalization of the protest activities which increased the number of arrests and introduced harsher punishments for using the constitutionally guaranteed right of the freedom of assembly. Since the Pussy Riot’s anti-Putin prayer, women have become increasingly visible in the protests.
OVD-INFO, an independent media project that monitors protests in the Russian Federation, upon the request of the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and Association, created a special report on women’s participation in the protests. A team of experts and scholars will be discussing the report and wider issues related to gender and protest in Russia on 8 March 2021 at 14.00-16.00 EET (Helsinki).
Main presentation:
Denis Shedov and Natalia Smirnova, OVD INFO
Violations of the Right to Peaceful Assembly for Women and Girls in Russia from 2010 to 2020. A Report for the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and Association
Discussion:
Olga Zeveleva, University of Helsinki
Aleksandra Rumyantseva, Centre for Advanced Governance, Russia
Andrei Semenov, Yale Macmillan Center, Yale University
Dmitry Kurnosov, Carlsberg Fellow, University of Helsinki
Dmitry Kurnosov studies how the election jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights impacts the development of law, resolution of electoral disputes and election administration in Finland, Denmark, and several Post-Soviet countries. He holds a PhD in Law from the University of Copenhagen. Prior to becoming a researcher, Dmitry has for several years been a Deputy Spokesperson of the Russian Constitutional Court.
