Russian human rights activist, MPs criticize anti-blasphemy bill

Duma Session file photo

(Interfax – Moscow, May 21, 2013) The head of Russia’s oldest human rights organization, the Moscow Helsinki Group, Lyudmila Alekseyeva, has said that the draft bill on the protection of believers’ feelings passed by the State Duma in the second reading (today) violates human rights and contravenes the Constitution, despite softening amendments.

“This is yet another repressive bill,” Alekseyeva told Interfax on Tuesday (21 May).

According to her, some cosmetic amendments do not change the essence of the bill.

“The have reduced the maximum punishment from five to three years (of imprisonment), so what? This bill is illiterate, it violates the Constitution and our international commitments. This law is contrary to common sense,” Alekseyeva said.

(Passage omitted: background)

(Earlier, Interfax reported that the State Duma had rejected an amendment sponsored by Communist MP Oleg Smolin that would have removed provisions relating to religious beliefs and feelings from the bill.

“The concept of ‘insulting someone’s feelings’ cannot have a legal definition. Radical believers can always decide that a different faith or no faith as such insults them… If the bill passes in its current form, it is unclear what to do with the works of many writers, poets and philosophers, such as Omar Khayyam, Bertrand Russell, Vissarion Belinskiy, Aleksandr Blok, Vladimir Mayakovskiy… What to do, after all, with Pushkin’s ‘Tale of the Priest and of his Workman Balda’?… Why are religious feelings protected separately while non-religious ones are not protected?” Oleg Smolin was quoted as saying during the parliamentary debate.

State-controlled Russian Channel One TV showed Mikhail Markelov MP from the ruling One Russia (United Russia) party defending the bill. “At first glance, the proposed punishment measures seemd quite harsh, but, in the grand scheme of things, they reflect the present state of affairs and impose serious responsibility on those people who, violating the law today, obstruct people who have certain religious preferences,” Markelov said.

However, the leader of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), Vladimir Zhirinovskiy MP, and the leader of the A Just Russia party, Sergey Mironov MP, disagreed with Markelov and criticized the bill.

“Everyone can interpret it in their own way – you looked askance at a mosque, or spat in the direction of a church, or somehow touched some religious clothes, or bumped into someone – of course this is unpleasant, you cannot do practically anything, everyone must remain silent,” Zhirinovskiy was shown saying.

“It is good that now actions rather than words will be punishable, this is positive. But, nevertheless, in our opinion, many citizens who have absolutely no intention to insult religious feelings may be led into trouble, as the popular saying goes,” Sergey Mironov added.)

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