In Russia, in the near future, there is a high probability that a category of citizens officially affected in their religious rights will appear. The corresponding law was recommended for adoption by the State Duma Committee on the Development of Civil Society, Issues of Public and Religious Associations. It means that people whose accounts have been frozen on suspicion of financing terrorism will be deprived of the right to be founders, participants and members of non-profit, public and religious organizations.
Let’s pay attention to the wording. First, the basis for violating the constitutional rights to freedom of assembly, association and conscience (see below) will not even be a legally binding court decision, but a decision by the security forces to freeze an account on suspicion of financing terrorism. Second, these people will be banned not only from forming and leading organizations, but also from being members of them.
How does this affect freedom of religion in addition to freedom of assembly and association? The point is that after the adoption of the so-called «Yarovaya Laws» a whole range of religious rights — from public preaching to prayer meetings — can only be realized by registered religious organizations. Thus, if a person is not a member of a religious organization, he will not be able to exercise the corresponding rights.
And now let’s remember that at the moment «terrorist» articles are attributed to people like Islamic educator and journalist Abdulmumin Gadjiev, and the recently released Imam Mahmut Velitov was convicted on such an article for praying for a murdered Muslim. At the moment, the number of Russians included in the Rosfinmonitoring list of extremists and terrorists, mostly without any court decision or accusation, is approaching 10,000 people. By the way, in this list «terrorists» are not separated from «extremists» — they all fall under the freezing of accounts, which means that protesters or employees of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation can be put in the same category as those accused of financing the «terrible international terrorist Abu Umar Sasitlinsky» through charitable donations for the construction of wells in Africa.
In general, we are now entering a period in which, after a few decades of relative freedoms in the post-Soviet era, which were maintained out of inertia in the early Putin years, the country is returning not only to stagnation but to a period of Bolshevik mass repression. Let us recall that after the seizure of power and the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly by the Bolsheviks, who established their dictatorship through methods of bloody terror, more than a million people were officially classified as so-called «deprived» and affected in various civil rights. True, in 1936, according to the Stalinist constitution, they formally restored these rights to them… only to begin sending them to the Gulag a year later.