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Summit in a Gray Zone
// Russia has resorted to very particular measures to maintain order in St. Petersburg
As the G8 summit in St. Petersburg approaches, unprecedented efforts are being made to prevent unauthorized protests. Radicals heading for St. Petersburg are being “talked to,” those who are unreceptive are being taken off trains, blockaded in hotel rooms and taken into custody under a variety of pretexts. Chairman of the president's council on human rights Ella Pamfilova says that dozens of cases are already known. The opposition says there have been more than a hundred. Just as radicals were prevented from traveling to the Other Russia conference in Moscow, they are now being kept out of St. Petersburg. The radicals say that, seen together, those actions have a clearly premeditated character.
For the last decade, anti-globalists have managed to stage ever larger protests at major international meetings. Authorities in the host countries have naturally tried to prevent disorder. Spain, for instance, went so far as to withdraw from the Schengen Agreement when the European Union summit took place in Barcelona and over 1000 potential demonstrators were refused visas. Russia has previous experience with preventative measures. Before the 1980 Moscow Olympics, for instance, all “unreliable” elements – criminals and the unemployed (unemployment was illegal then) – were moved 101 km. away from the city. In imperial Russia, problematic individuals were often forbidden to leave their native towns or to enter large cities.
Current Russian practice differs from that of European countries and from that of Soviet times in the absence of legally established procedures and formal criteria. Russian authorities cannot openly and officially thus impede the radicals within the model of a law-governed state. Therefore, no operation exists officially, as the Interior Ministry confirms. But it exists in practice. Often the persons who detain the radicals show no identification. Frivolous charges are made against the radicals. They are often threatened with physical violence and sometimes actually beaten. There is no legal basis for a ban on travel to St. Petersburg.
Thus a gray zone is seen between the law and reality, and the current Russian state is less lawful than the Soviet state or Russian Empire. The police are used to guarantee order and solve political problems. The people traveling to Moscow to attend the Other Russia conference had no intentions of committing illegal acts and their detention is in practice a form of political repression and a violation of their constitutional rights.
All the Article in Russian as of July 14, 2006
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Photo: Pavel Smertin
