Communicated on 19 October 2015
FIRST SECTION
Application no. 8630/11
Aleksey Valentinovich SUPRUNENKO
against Russia
lodged on 5 January 2011
STATEMENT OF FACTS
The applicant, Mr Aleksey Valentinovich Suprunenko, is a Russian national, who was born in 1957 and lives in Saint Petersburg.
The facts of the case, as submitted by the applicant, may be summarised as follows.
The applicant is an advocate and an amateur photographer. In August 2008 he travelled from Saint Petersburg to Georgiyevsk for a holiday in an ancestral home. Georgiyevsk is a seventy-thousand town in Russia’s southern region of Stavropol that faces the north Caucasus. The house used to belong to the applicant’s grandmother whom the applicant had frequented as a child and adult.
In the afternoon of 31 August 2008 the applicant went out to shoot pictures. At 5.45 p.m., as he was walking around a school, point-and-shoot camera in hand, a patrol car pulled up. Two officers with assault rifles accosted him, charged him with breaching local law and littering with sunflower seed husks (a popular snack), and ordered him to follow them to a station. The applicant refused but the policemen forced him into the car.
At the station the officers wondered why the applicant was photographing the school. The applicant explained that he was after landscapes, architecture, and street scenes, not the school, and that at any rate the school was no secret installation. He urged the officers to either let him go or come up with a stronger reason for arresting him. The officers replied that shooting the school was reason enough. They frisked his pockets but showed no interest in his camera’s memory card. In an hour another officer accused the applicant of having escaped from prison and said that he would check his name against an escapees’ database. The applicant denied that charge.
In a while two officers drove the applicant to his house. They asked a drunk passerby woman if she knew the applicant. She said she didn’t. One officer ordered the applicant to go home to fetch an ID. To justify his presence in the town, the applicant showed his escorts IDs, house documents and a ticket from Saint Petersburg. The officers drove him back to the station against his protests.
At the station the officers fingerprinted the applicant, took a mugshot, and catalogued his body features. The book entry indicated the applicant’s name, date and place of birth, ethnic origin, detention status, permanent and temporary addresses, physical data (height, frame, hair, face colour, eye colour, and tattoos), date of arrest, and ID details. The officer told the applicant that this data would be indefinitely held on a database of the Interior Ministry. At 8.30 p.m. the police let the applicant go.
On his return to Saint Petersburg, on 22 November 2008 the applicant sought judicial review of his arrest and the storage of his personal data.
On 12 January 2010 the Kuybyshevskiy District Court of Saint Petersburg held for the police. It found that the officers had followed Order 382 issued by the Stavropol Regional Interior Department on 18 August 2008. That order commanded them to watch out for photographers lurking around schools on the eve of 1 September, the start of academic year. The court reproved the applicant for not giving the officers a good account of his photographic interest and for overlooking that his pastime might unnerve the wary locals of the terror-vexed region. The court denied that the applicant had been fingerprinted and found lawful the storage of his personal data.
On 6 July 2010 the Saint Petersburg City Court upheld the judgment and clarified the motives for the arrest. Order 382 aimed to avert a repeat of the Beslan hostage tragedy[1] by putting the town police on high alert from 30 August to 2 September 2008. The police had swept schools for explosives and were looking out for potential assailants and hostile surveillance. As the applicant carried no ID, the officers had to take him to the station and searched his name in databases of the Federal Security Service and the Interior Ministry. The arrest served the public weal, was brief, did the applicant no harm, the applicant was spared charges. The entry of the applicant’s mugshot and personal data into the police station’s blotter respected his rights.
COMPLAINTS
1. The applicant complains under Article 5 § 1 of the Convention that the police abused their power by stopping him, a law-abiding photographer, upon a frivolous and untenable suspicion of scouting for terrorists.
2. The applicant complains under Article 8 that, though he had committed no crime, the police perpetuated his personal information in a classified database shielded from public control.
QUESTIONS TO THE PARTIES
1. Was the applicant deprived of his liberty in breach of Article 5 § 1 of the Convention? In particular, did the deprivation of liberty fall within paragraph (c) of this provision? If it did, was the suspicion against the applicant reasonable? Was there a need to take him back to the police station after he had proved his identity?
2. Did the record of the applicant’s personal data interfere with his right to respect for his private life, within the meaning of Article 8 § 1 of the Convention? If so, was that interference in accordance with the law and necessary in terms of Article 8 § 2 (see S. and Marper v. the United Kingdom [GC], nos. 30562/04 and 30566/04, §§ 58–126, ECHR 2008, and Peruzzo and Martens v. Germany (dec.), nos. 7841/08 and 57900/12, 4 June 2013)?
[1]. An attack on a school in Beslan, a city in the north Caucasus region of North Ossetia, Russia, committed in September 2004 by insurgents from the nearby Chechnya that killed over 330 people, mostly children.
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