At a Supreme Court hearing on the Rodina party's lawsuit to remove Yabloko from the State Duma election, a Central Election Commission (CEC) representative supported several of the plaintiff's arguments. In particular, the commission agreed that a quote from the song "May There Always Be Sunshine" in an interview with Yabloko founder Grigory Yavlinsky constitutes a copyright violation.
The interview, titled "How to Vote for a Ceasefire," published on the party's website in late July, was deemed by the CEC to be campaign material. According to the commission, Yabloko also failed to prove the legality of using images of Dmitry Medvedev and Victoria Bonya, as well as footage from Sergei Bondarchuk's film "War and Peace." These materials are listed in Rodina's lawsuit.
The CEC did not support all claims. It found no violations in the use of images generated by neural networks, saying copyright norms do not apply to them. The claim about borrowing the party's logo from El Lissitzky's poster "Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge" was also not confirmed. The publication of a photo of Ella Pamfilova and Alexander Beglov was deemed informational, not campaign material.
During the hearing, it emerged that the heir of composer Arkady Ostrovsky does not object to the party quoting the song "May There Always Be Sunshine."
A CEC representative also said that last week the commission received a document from Rosfinmonitoring indicating that the federal list of Yabloko includes individuals who received funding from foreign sources. Similar data, according to the representative, exists for several dozen party counterparties. The document is marked "for official use" — party lawyers will be allowed to review it only under a non-disclosure agreement, so it was not considered at the hearing.
The CEC representative called the arguments about violations of intellectual property law the most substantial in the lawsuit, saying this is grounds for canceling the registration of the federal candidate list. Yabloko is the only registered party that publicly advocates for a cessation of hostilities in Ukraine. It is running its campaign under the slogan "For Peace and Freedom."
Sources differ: Meduza reports that Rosfinmonitoring found foreign funding for individuals on Yabloko's federal list and several dozen party counterparties. The Insider specifies that the CEC received the document last week, and the commission's representative did not count it at the hearing — lawyers will only be able to review it under a non-disclosure agreement.