Communicated on 30 August 2017
THIRD SECTION
Application no. 10271/12
Roman Olegovich KILIN
against Russia
lodged on 31 December 2011
SUBJECT MATTER OF THE CASE
The applicant was convicted under Article 280 of the Criminal Code and sentenced to a suspended prison term of eighteen months in relation to the uploading of a video and a music video to the VKontakte account, which allegedly belonged to the applicant. The courts considered that the above material contained calls for “violent actions directed at inciting enmity between Russians and Azeris”. The applicant unsuccessfully denied that he had not uploaded any such material and had never accessed the VKontakte website from his computer.
QUESTIONS tO THE PARTIES
1. Was the exclusion of the public from the appeal hearing “strictly necessary” under Article 6 § 1 of the Convention?
2. Was there a violation of Article 10 of the Convention on account of the prison sentence imposed in relation to the applicant’s “liking” (as he puts it, симпатия) expressed toward the impugned video and audio material, by way of uploading material to his Internet page? In particular:
- Was it convincingly established that the applicant had made calls for extremist activities, namely physical violence against persons of the Azeri origin?
- Did the domestic courts adduce “relevant and “sufficient” reasons for the interference and base their conclusions on an acceptable assessment of the facts (see, as regards the applicable principles, Perinçek v. Switzerland [GC], no. 27510/08, §§ 204-208, ECHR 2015 (extracts) as regards the pertinent factors, and Terentyev v. Russia, no. 25147/09, §§ 20-24, 26 January 2017 as regards the approach)? Did they specify which parts of the impugned material were problematic? Did they draw their own conclusions from the linguistic study of the material (see paragraph 23 of the Plenary Supreme Court’s ruling no. 11 of 28 June 2011)?
3. The parties are requested to submit (a) a copy of the impugned video and audio materials, (b) the original Russian text and an English translation of the linguistics report which is mentioned the court decisions.
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