Yarovaya Law

Legislative history

In April 2016 Irina Yarovaya, together with Aleksei Pushkov, and Nadezhda Gerasimova and senator Victor Ozerov introduced a project of legislation that would toughen penalties for extremism and terrorism. On 13 May 2016, the act passed after the first reading. Prior to that, it had received support from the vice-president's cabinet. On 7 July it was signed by the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin.

Most of the act's amendments came into effect on 20 July 2016. Amendments that require telecom operators to store recordings of phone conversations, text messages and users' internet traffic up to 6 months were announced to come into place on 1 July 2018; however, senator Anton Belyakov has submitted a proposal to move the regulations' start date to 2023, because of the extreme amount of data storage technology needed to make fulfilling the requirements possible.

Surveillance and penal provisions

The amendments of the Yarovaya's Act include lengthening of prison terms for a number of criminal activities, introduction of new reasons to deny entry or departure to and from Russia, a requirement for telecom providers to store all metadata about phone calls and text messages from 6 months to 3 years in the interests of the security services, requiring email and messaging service providers to have cryptographic backdoors, and introduction of criminal liability for failure to report to law enforcement authorities that someone else "has been planning, is perpetrating, or has perpetrated" terrorist activity.

Anti-evangelism provisions

The amendments also include new restrictions on evangelism and missionary work. The amendments add a new provision to Russia's Religion Legislation, stating that "missionary activity" may only be performed "without hindrance" at churches and other religious sites designated by the chapter, and that it is expressly forbidden to perform missionary activities in private residences. "Missionary activity" is defined as "the activity of a religious association, aimed at disseminating information about its beliefs among people who are not participants (members, followers) in that religious association, with the purpose of involving these people as participants (members, followers). It is carried out directly by religious associations or by citizens and/or legal entities authorised by them, publicly, with the help of the media, the internet or other lawful means." Missionary activities may not be used to pursue violations of public safety, "the motivation of citizens to refuse to fulfil their civic duties as established by law and to commit other illegal acts", suicide, or the refusal of medical treatment on religious grounds as aims.

Missionary activities may only be performed by authorized members of registered religious groups and organizations. A group becomes ineligible to perform missionary activities if they have been banned under a court order for practicing extremism or terrorism, or have been liquidated. Foreign missionaries may only perform missionary activities after registering for a permit from a recognized religious organization. Citizens are also required to report unauthorized religious activity to the government or face fines.

Surveillance provisions

Because of unprecedented data storage requirements, implementation of the law has been described as impossible and extremely expensive. Russian Post estimated that the implementation of the law would cost the organization 500 billion rubles (7.7 billion USD as of August 2016) for initial purchases of equipment and 100 billion rubles (1.5 billion USD) yearly. Implementation of the law by other delivery and freight services was estimated to cost around 180 billion rubles, which is projected to cause 30–40% drop in online number of purchases. Cell service operators will need 2.2 trillion rubles to comply, which will cause a two- or threefold rise in the cost of mobile services for the consumer. Edward Snowden estimated the combined cost of implementation to be 33 billion dollars and predicted that the overall security levels will be unaffected, despite giant affiliated costs.

After Putin signed the law, it turned out that equipment that is needed to store all the data is non-existent not only in Russia, but in the world. Because of that Putin has issued a call for government contacts to Russian companies for the required hardware and software.

Anti-evangelism provisions

A number of missionaries have been subject to arrest for violating the law and, upon conviction, have been fined. Donald and Ruth Ossewaarde, independent missionaries working in Oryol, were fined 40,000 rubles (around $700), prompting the couple to leave the country; Sergei Zhuravlyov, a Ukrainian Reformed Orthodox Church of Christ representative, was arrested for engaging in preaching in St. Petersburg; and Ebenezer Tuah of Ghana, the leader of the Christ Embassy church, was arrested and fined 50,000 rubles for conducting baptisms at a sanatorium.

On 9 July 2016, Jim Mulcahy, a 72-year-old American pastor who is the Eastern European coordinator for the U.S.-based Metropolitan Community Church, was arrested and deported under the prohibition of missionary activities at non-religious sites, after advertising and holding a "tea party" in Samara with an LGBT group. Authorities had targeted Mulcahy under suspicions that he was planning to organize a same-sex wedding.

Criticism and protests

The legislation project has received negative expert opinions from the Human Rights Council under the President of the Russian Federation on 20 April 2016.[1] and a special expert group "Telecom and IT" under the Russian Government. The Russian largest telecom and internet companies expressed their concerns regarding negative impacts this law may have on telecommunication and internet industries in particular and the Russian economy on the whole. A change.org petition to completely cancel Yarovaya's Act collected over 600,000 signatures. Russian Public Initiative petition has been signed more than 100,000 times. A number of protests were organized in cities like Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg, Ufa, Kazan and Volgograd. A 9 August protest in Moscow has seen over 2,000 participants.

The anti-evangelism provisions of the legislation prompted an outcry of concern and opposition from Russia's Protestant minority, which makes up about 1% of Russia's population. According to experts, the law is likely to be interpreted in a way so as to block churches other than the Russian Orthodox Church evangelizing to ethnic Russians.

Thomas J. Reese, who heads the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, a federal government agency that monitors religious expression around the world, warned that the new restrictions "will make it easier for Russian authorities to repress religious communities, stifle peaceful dissent, and detain and imprison people." "Neither these measures nor the currently existing antiextremism law meet international human rights and religious freedom standards."

One effect of the law is seen as effecting tight restrictions on the activities of religious groups, particularly smaller denominations with a smaller presence in Russia who have long been viewed with hostility from state officials and religious authorities, and who were already were subjected to a 1997 law that required registration and administrative procedures which many said they found were onerous and expensive to comply with.

Faith McDonnell, director of religious liberty programs at the Institute on Religion and Democracy in Washington, D.C., said in an interview that, "The law doesn't do that much to defend from terrorism and only prevents Christians and others who are not [Russian] Orthodox from preaching and proselytizing." Archbishop Andrew Maklakov, administrator of the Russian Orthodox Autonomous Church of America complained that, "As the Russian Federation has drifted back to its Soviet roots more and more over the past 25 years, it has increasingly sought to harass, persecute, and destroy any religious organization that it might consider competition to its own ‘state church.’” In an email, U.S. State Department Nicole Thompson stated that “We believe that these new amendments will not better protect Russia’s citizens, but are rather part of a troubling Russian trend of intimidation and harassment of civil society and political activists.”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit group that aims to defend civil liberties in the digital world, opposed the “Yarovaya package" as being "a set of radical “anti-terrorism” provisions," and reported that "opposition to the Yarovaya package has come from many quarters. Technical experts have been united in opposing the law. Russia’s government Internet ombudsman opposed the bill. Putin’s own human rights head, Mikhail Fedotov, called upon the Senators of Russia’s Federal Council to reject the bill. ISPs have pointed out that compliance would cost them trillions of rubles."

And regarding the requirements it warned that since Russia’s ISPs, messaging services, and social media platforms "cannot reasonably comply with all the demands of the Yarovaya package, they become de facto criminals whatever their actions. And that, in turn, gives the Russian state the leverage to extract from them any other concession it desires. The impossibility of full compliance is not a bug—it’s an essential feature."