Human Rights Defender Jailed 25 Days in Detention for Social Media Post in Russia

A Russian court has unjustly jailed one of the founders of Russia’s human rights movement for a Facebook post about a peaceful protest, Human Rights Watch said today.

Ariana News Agency- On December 5, 2018, a court in Moscow sentenced Lev Ponomarev, 77, to 25 days in jail for alleged repeated violations of public assembly rules. Ponomarev should be freed immediately.

 Ponomarev’s jailing shows that in today’s Russia, nothing is off limits for the authorities, not free speech, nor peaceful assembly, nor high-profile human rights defenders, ” said Rachel Denber, deputy director of the Europe and Central Asia Division at Human Rights Watch. “And perhaps this is precisely the message the Russian authorities hope to send.”

Russia’s Presidential Human Rights Council has called for Ponomarev’s release, as have the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights and Amnesty International.

Ponomarev is the leader of For Human Rights, an independent human rights group. On October 28, he described, on his blog and Facebook page the Moscow city authorities’ refusal to permit a peaceful protest in the city center. He documented the organizers’ attempts to obtain permission and explained why the ban violated human rights norms. Ponomarev wrote that he would go to the protest site that day but stated explicitly that he was not encouraging anyone else to go and emphasized that each person had to decide for themselves whether to attend.

Later that day, several hundred people decided to peacefully assemble in Moscow and in St. Petersburg, and police detained dozens of them. Ponomarev was not among them. However, on December 1 police arrested him at his home and took him to a police station, citing repeated violations of the rules on public assemblies. On December 5, the Tverskoy District Court sentenced him to 25 days for incitement to participate in an unauthorized protest. Since he had been fined in July for a peaceful, single-person protest, it was considered a repeat violation. He appealed the verdict on December 6.

Russia’s public assembly laws violate the right to freedom of assembly by setting out excessively harsh penalties for unauthorized, yet peaceful gatherings, Human Rights Watch said.