Source:
RUSSIA: Has
"madness" of banning religious publications been stopped?
By Felix Corley, Forum 18
5 January 2012
On 20 December 2011, Russia's
Ambassador to India Aleksandr Kadakin agreed with widespread Indian outrage at
attempts by prosecutors in the Siberian city of Tomsk to declare the book the
Bhagavad-Gita As It Is "extremist". "It is not normal either
when religious books are sent for examination to ignorant people," Kadakin
added, describing those seeking to ban the work as "madmen". Eight
days later a Tomsk court finally rejected the prosecutor's suit. Yuri Pleshakov
of Moscow's Hare Krishna community welcomed the ruling. "I hope the
authorities will learn their lesson and that the case can now be
forgotten," he told Forum 18 News Service. However, the prosecution case
to ban a further Jehovah's Witness work resumes in court in Krasnodar Region on
16 January. 68 Jehovah's Witness publications and 15 works of the late Turkish
Muslim theologian Said Nursi have already been ruled "extremist" and
placed on the Federal List of Extremist Materials, making it illegal to distribute
or store them for distribution.
A court in the Siberian city
of Tomsk has rejected the Prosecutor's Office suit to have the Russian
translation of the Bhagavad-Gita As It Is – a key book for Hare Krishna
devotees – declared "extremist" and banned throughout Russia.
However, it is not yet known if prosecutors will appeal against the ruling.
Before the court issued its 28 December 2011 decision, Russia's Ambassador to
India Aleksandr Kadakin described those who initiated the case as "madmen"
and insisted "this madness should be stopped". However, moves to ban
religious works on similar grounds continue, including in Krasnodar Region,
Forum 18 News Service notes.
Bans and censorship
The attempted ban on the
Bhagavad-Gita As It Is would have been the first time a work of the Hare
Krishna community had been declared "extremist". A total of 68
Jehovah's Witness publications, as well as 15 Russian translations of the works
of the late Turkish Muslim theologian Said Nursi, have already been ruled
"extremist" and placed on the Federal List of Extremist Materials,
making it illegal to distribute or store them for distribution. Other works on
the Federal List include the Russian translation of Adolf Hitler's book Mein
Kampf (see eg. F18News 21 June 2011 http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=1582).
In November 2011, the state
authorities stepped up blocking of Jehovah's Witness websites, while questions
remain about why a private company in Penza, NSS, suddenly broke off a contract
with the Hare Krishna community to distribute sms messages (see F18News 2
December 2011 http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=1642). Despite
promises to do so, NSS staff had not answered Forum 18's questions by 5 January
as to whether the company had decided itself to cancel the contract or whether
this had been ordered by a court or a state agency.
Hare Krishna book "not
extremist"
On 28 December 2011, Judge
Galina Butenko of Tomsk's Lenin District Court rejected the prosecutor's suit
to have the third Russian edition of the Bhagavad-Gita As It Is ruled
extremist. "During the [28 December] court session," the court
website noted the following day, "the decision part of the ruling was
announced. The basis of the refusal to satisfy the suit will be set out in the
reasoned part of the court ruling, which will be prepared on 2 January 2012.
Participants in the case will be able to receive a copy of the court ruling in
final form on 10 January 2012."
Because of the New Year and
Christmas holidays in Russia, Forum 18 was unable to reach the office of Tomsk
Prosecutor Viktor Fedotov, who brought the suit. However, on 29 December 2011
an unnamed official of the Regional Prosecutor's Office told Interfax-Religion
that as the basis on which the court had rejected the suit is not yet known, it
was unable to say if it would appeal. Only once the full ruling had been issued
on or after 10 January would it be possible to say, the official added.
Welcoming the court ruling was
Yuri Pleshakov of Moscow's Hare Krishna community, who has closely followed the
case. "We are likely to see the full ruling only after the country wakes
up after the holidays on 10 January," he told Forum 18 from Moscow on 4
January. "Although it is not clear on what basis the court reached its
decision, we welcome it. We're pleased that this attempt to harm the rights of
religious believers failed."
Pleshakov insisted that his
community regards the attempt to ban the book as a "mistake" by
officials. "I hope the authorities will learn their lesson and that the
case can now be forgotten."
Similarly insisting that the
authorities need to learn their lesson from the court outcome was Russia's
Ombudsperson for Human Rights Vladimir Lukin, who took a close interest in
proceedings. He told Interfax-Religion on 29 December 2011 that the whole case
was an "unpleasant story" and described the Prosecutor's suit as
"very strange". "The struggle with terrorism is a struggle with
real terrorist planning and creation of groups, and not with the interpretation
of ancient holy books, of whatever faith they might belong to," he added.
Controversy
The attempt to ban the
Bhagavad-Gita As it Is aroused great controversy in Russia and internationally.
The book is a Russian edition of a translation by Swami Prabhupada, founder of
the International Society for Krishna Consciousness. An "expert
analysis" completed in October 2010 by three academics at Tomsk State
University at the request of FSB security service officer Dmitry Velikotsky
found that the book "contains signs of incitement of religious hatred and
humiliation of an individual based on gender, race, ethnicity, language, origin
or attitude to religion".
Fedotov, Tomsk's Prosecutor,
asked Lenin District Court to find the book extremist and send its ruling to
the federal authorities in Moscow, so that it could be included in the Federal
List of Extremist Materials and banned throughout Russia.
The case began at Lenin
District Court on 12 August 2011, but was suspended after the fourth hearing on
30 August when the Court controversially ordered a new "expert
analysis" by three "specialists" of Kemerovo State University.
This "psychological/religious studies/linguistic expert analysis" –
for which the authors were paid from state funds - was presented to the court
on 15 December, its website notes.
At the 19 December 2011
hearing, it became known that one of the Kemerovo "experts" had not
found evidence of extremism in the book, though the two others said they had.
Tomsk regional Ombudsperson
for Human Rights Nelli Krechetova asked for a statement to be included in the
record. Stressing that she was not simply defending the interests of the local
Hare Krishna community but of the rights to freedom of religion or belief
guaranteed in Russia's Constitution, she condemned the case as
"absurd". She said holy books of the world religions should not be
subject to court hearings as to whether they are "extremist".
"Secondly, a possible ban
on a book and subsequently a ban on the religious activity of those who honour
it violate citizens' rights to freedom of conscience and belief and freedom of
speech." Krechetova pointed out that no extremist activity initiated by
this book had been seen in Russia.
Russia's Ombudsperson Lukin
also requested that his representative be allowed to participate, which was
granted. The case was then adjourned until 28 December.
The final 28 December 2011
hearing was brief. Judge Butenko rejected the prosecution move to change the
formulation of the accusation, and rejected the defence move to commission a
new "expert analysis". After withdrawing for half-an-hour, she
returned to announce that she was rejecting the prosecution suit.
Handling Indian outrage
The case aroused fierce
condemnation in India, with senior politicians raising the issue with their Russian
counterparts.
Kadakin, Russia's Ambassador
in New Delhi, was especially outspoken, describing the attempts to ban the book
as "sad". In a 20 December English-language statement posted on the
Russian Embassy website, he claimed Russia respected the scriptures of all
faiths and described it as "categorically inadmissible when any holy
scripture is taken to the courts". "It is not normal either when
religious books are sent for examination to ignorant people," he added.
"Their academic scrutiny should be done at scientists' fora, congresses,
seminars, etc but not in courts." He even described those seeking to ban
the work in Tomsk as "madmen".
Ambassador Kadakin went
further in an interview with the Indian English-language television station
CNN-IBN broadcast the same day. He welcomed the outrage expressed in the Indian
Parliament and said that "our two governments should not allow such things
to happen". He also welcomed pressure from Human Rights Ombudsperson
Lukin, though he claimed that Russian courts are independent. He repeated his
earlier description of those initiating the case as "madmen", adding
that "this madness should be stopped".
The transcript and a link to
the video of the interview were posted to the Russian Embassy website. However,
Forum 18 could find no Russian-language text of Ambassador Kadakin's comments
on the website.
On 20 December, Russian
Embassy Senior Counsellor Sergei Karmalito told the Indian ANI television
channel that it was "very regrettable" that the "local controversy
in the city of Tomsk" had reached the court. He denied that the court had
been intending to ban the book. "You can't ban any sacred text," he
claimed (although that would have been the case had the book been declared
"extremist").
However, in a 22 December
Foreign Ministry briefing in Moscow, of which a transcript was posted on the
Ministry website, spokesperson Aleksandr Lukashevich claimed that the Tomsk
case was directed not at the Bhagavad-Gita as such. He said it was directed at
Swami Prabhupada's commentaries to his translation of it "which were
considered to fall under the scope of Article 13 of Russia's Federal Law on
Countering Extremist Activity".
Lukashevich then added that
the case was also directed at Swami Prabhupada's "inadequate" translation
of the original text, "the double translation of which suffers from
distortions of meaning". He gave no evidence for his claims of any
"distortions", nor did he explain why it was the role of the Foreign
Ministry to determine whether a translation of a religious book is accurate or
not.
Who inspired banning attempt?
While the Lenin District Court
proceedings made clear that the FSB security service had initiated the 2010
"expert analysis" of the Bhagavad-Gita As It Is, regional FSB
officials insisted to Forum 18 in August 2011 that it had played "no
role" in the case and that the Prosecutor's Office had been behind the
suit. The Tomsk Prosecutor's Office refused to tell Forum 18 in August 2011 who
had decided to initiate the case (see F18News 10 October 2011
http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=1623).
In an analysis posted on his
Livejournal blog on 2 January, Nikolai Karpitsky carefully reviewed all the
evidence of possible initiators of the Tomsk case. Karpitsky - a philosophy
lecturer at Siberian State Medical University in Tomsk, who is himself Russian
Orthodox – took a close interest in the case on the side of the defence and
attended hearings.
Karpitsky argues that despite
evidence of FSB involvement, it is unlikely its officers would have initiated
the case "unless they had an order from elsewhere". He also discounts
the idea that the three Tomsk University "experts" who conducted the
initial 2010 analysis were behind it, given their surprise that it would be
used in court to try to ban the book and their renunciation of their analysis
in court. He also rejects the idea that other academics could have been behind
it.
Karpitsky notes that an order
or team could have come from Moscow to oversee the case, but can find no
evidence of this. He points out that the FSB security service kept secret the
case between October 2010 and June 2011. He argues that had the FSB been
following a secret instruction from Moscow to prepare the case for court it
would not have allowed Maksim Stepanenko, the head of the Tomsk Russian
Orthodox Diocese's Missionary Centre, to launch an attack on the book on 29
June 2011, one day before the prosecution case was handed to Lenin District
Court. Stepanenko's extensive attack on quotes from the work closely paralleled
the 2010 "expert analysis" which was not yet available to the court.
Karpitsky describes Stepanenko
as "the remaining possibility" as the initiator of the case.
Stepanenko rejected such
suggestions, attacking Karpitsky's analysis which he appeared to have read.
"I didn't know there would be a court case about the book when I published
my article," he told Forum18 from Tomsk on 5 January. He denied that he
had any contacts with the FSB or the Prosecutor's Office. While welcoming the
attempt to ban the book, he insisted he had learnt of the case from materials
published on the internet by the Hare Krishna community. Stepanenko had put the
phone down before Forum 18 could ask if he had access to the 2010 analysis
before he published his June 2011 article.
Karpitsky also questioned why
so much tax-payers' money had been devoted to the case to ban a religious work.
