Airat Shakirov
- Criminal Code
- Article 282 part 1, Russian Criminal Code
- Case category
- Extremism cases
- Verdict
- Fine
- Date of verdict
- 2017-05-15
- Region
- Tatarstan
Case summary
He was charged with incitement to hatred because he posted a video from a rally in Makhachkala on February 8, 2013 against police brutality on his VKontakte page, a video that was included in the Federal List of Extremist Materials. Shakirov claimed that his laptop had been unattended for some time and the video could have been posted by someone else, besides he himself deleted the video immediately after it appeared on the list. On May 16, 2017, he was sentenced to a fine of one hundred thousand rubles and released from punishment due to the expiration of the statute of limitations.
In 2009 and 2010, the prosecutor's office issued warnings to Shakirov about the unacceptability of extremist activity. In July 2012, he was arrested on suspicion of involvement in the attempted assassination of Mufti Ildus Faizov and the murder of his deputy Valiulla Yakupov, but no evidence of his involvement in the crime was found. In 2015, he was one of the public defenders of nationalist activist Rafis Kashapov. Then he also was given 10 days of arrest under Article 20.3 of the Administrative Code - for two images in support of Ukraine in "VKontakte", a collage and a cartoon with a swastika. The cartoon, showing a man with a whip chasing swastikas from Donbass, was accompanied by the inscription "Russia, go home". The judge said in his ruling that the association of swastikas with Russia is not acceptable.
Others charged under Article 282 part 1, Russian Criminal Code
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Source: this person’s record in the OVD-Info political persecution database
Published under CC BY 3.0. The criteria for treating a person as politically persecuted belong to OVD-Info; FACTUM relays their assessment and makes none of its own.
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