Moscow Closes Down One of Last Legal Ways to Protest Regime’s Actions – Linked Individual Protests

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 6 – Up until now, those who wanted to protest government policies but couldn’t get approval for large demonstrations could use a loophole in Russian law that had allowed them to stage individual protests in which one demonstrator would replace another, thus attracting more attention to their causes.

           

            But now the Moscow city court has now ruled that such interconnected individual protests constitute a single action and that, as such, they constitute a demonstration that requires sanction from the authorities or those who take part in it will be subject to arrests and fines (t.me/apologia/2078).

            Rights activists say that individual pickets that take place successively rather than simultaneously must not be equated with demonstrations; but the court decision in Moscow likely will spread across the Russian Federation and effectively block one of the last remaining ways to protest in public in Putin’s Russia (sobkorr.org/news/5EDA6568A0908.html).

            There have been hundreds of one-person protests in Russia over the last several years. At the very least, this new decision will reduce their number because many who have taken part in them have done so because what they were doing was entirely legal and carried relatively little risk.

            Now, those thinking about taking such an action face the likelihood that they will be detained and fined – and perhaps worse be identified as an opponent of the regime and suffer other sanctions as well, including loss of positions or social opprobrium as “law breakers,” activists suggest.