The Russian government's dismantling of civic freedoms since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 is a dramatic escalation of its sustained assault on fundamental rights spanning more than a decade, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today.
The 205-page report, "Russia's Legislative Minefield: Tripwires for Civil Society since 2020," focuses on the wave of repressive legislation and policies that the Russian government of President Vladimir Putin has adopted since 2020 and how the Kremlin has used them to suppress internal dissent and incapacitate civil society. These laws severely restrict the rights to freedom of expression, association, and peaceful assembly, and impose state-enforced historical, social, and political narratives in public life.
All of the Russian activists freed from prison as part of the August 1, 2024, prisoner swap were charged under laws described in the report. But hundreds more remain jailed or imprisoned under these laws. Critical discussion about a vast range of issues cannot take place openly, and many dissenters, journalists, and activists have gone into exile.
"The Russian government is forcing civic activists and journalists to tread dangerously on a legislative minefield, and their resilience is being tested like never before," said Rachel Denber, deputy Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch. "Yet independent groups and media are persisting, and they provide hope for the eventual transformation of Russia into a country committed to protecting and promoting fundamental rights."
Human Rights Watch examined this repressive legislation in eight broad areas: "foreign agents," public assembly, electoral rights, freedom of expression, sexual orientation and gender identity, treason and similar concepts, historical truth, and education.
The signature legislation in the government's legislative crackdown is the "foreign agents" law, which seeks to smear any person or entity that is independently critical of the government as "foreign," and therefore suspicious or even traitorous. Russian authorities first enacted "foreign agent" provisions in 2012 and since then have repeatedly made them harsher and used them as a pretext for shutting down some of the country's leading human rights groups. The report traces how provisions first targeted nongovernmental organizations, then unregistered groups, media outlets, journalists, and other categories of individuals and, by 2022, anyone the state deemed to be "under foreign influence."
Penalties have stiffened over time and now include fines, imprisonment, and revocation of citizenship for naturalized citizens. By 2022-2023, amendments also excluded alleged "foreign agents" from many aspects of public life, including civil service and teaching, as the authorities sought to create, in the words of one activist, "a caste of untouchables."
A series of amendments shredded what had remained of freedom of peaceful assembly, effectively making legitimate protest illegal, Human Rights Watch said. The authorities introduced a stringent licensing system that requires protest organizers to request and receive explicit authorization for a public assembly. They equated public strolls and a series of single-person pickets with mass protests, closing the few loopholes that people had used to hold protests and avoid Russia's repressive public assembly provisions. They introduced extremely unrealistic requirements for verifying the origins of funds and donations for public events and for reporting on their management.
War censorship laws, hastily adopted after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, ban spreading information or views about the conduct of Russian armed forces that deviates from official information. Penalties include long prison sentences, stripping naturalized Russians of their citizenship, and confiscating property. More than 480 people have faced criminal prosecution on war censorship charges.
Other amendments make it a criminal offense to criticize the work of the security services under the vaguely defined concept of "public calls against state security" and introduce harsher criminal defamation charges and penalties.
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people have long faced discrimination, harassment, and violence, particularly in the context of the 2013 anti-gay "propaganda" law. Legislative amendments adopted since 2022 mark a full-on attack, as the Kremlin has positioned itself as a global defender of "traditional values," Human Rights Watch said.
The amendments expanded the propaganda law to effectively ban public discussions about sexual orientation and gender identity and ban any depiction of so-called "non-traditional relationships" directed toward people under 18. Even images showing a same-sex couple holding hands can be shown only subject to new restrictions or if marked as restricted, paid content. Bookshops have started covering books that could potentially trigger a violation under the new laws or have pulled them from the shelves.
A 2023 Supreme Court ruling designated the "International LGBT Movement" an "extremist organization," opening the floodgates to arbitrary prosecution and imprisonment of LGBT people and of anyone who defends their rights or expresses solidarity with them.
New laws expand the definitions of treason to cover people without access to state secrets and of espionage to cover transferring information to a widened definition of "hostile agents" that includes foreign and international organizations. The treason laws' authors openly acknowledged that the law seeks to target civil society groups. Other laws criminalize cooperation with international bodies "to which Russia is not a party," such as the International Criminal Court in The Hague, and involvement with foreign actors in "confidential cooperation" against Russia's national security. New provisions also ban involvement with unregistered foreign organizations and widen the ban on involvement with organizations designated by the authorities as "undesirable."
In 2023, authorities sent to Russian courts 101 cases for treason, espionage, and confidential cooperation, five times as many as they had in 2022, according to a media report based on Russian court data. Criminal prosecutions for involvement in "undesirable" organizations have been on the rise.
The 2020 constitutional amendments enshrined in law the notion of "historical truth" that Russia undertakes to "protect." In 2021, parliament adopted laws that ban comparisons between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany and criminalize insulting the memory of World War II veterans.
The broader context involves the authorities imposing an official historical narrative, glorifying Soviet-era achievements while downplaying, justifying, or in some cases contesting the facts of Joseph Stalin's Great Terror and other Soviet-era atrocities, Human Rights Watch said.
Laws adopted in 2021 imposed stricter oversight over education, further limiting Russians' access to information; eliminating alternatives to the historical, social, and political narratives that the government is promoting; and controlling interactions with foreigners.
Russia's government should end its long-running repression and instead foster an environment in which civil society can thrive, Human Rights Watch said. It should repeal the draconian legal provisions and follow recommendations set out by the United Nations and other intergovernmental organizations to bring legislation and practices in line with Russia's international human rights obligations.
"The Kremlin keeps turning the clock back toward past tyranny," Denber said. "Russia's laws should be expanding respect for rights, not destroying them."
