Terrorism Will Be Classified?

On June 22, a bill was submitted to the State Duma, proposing to amend the provision of the Federal Law “On State Secret”, Article 5, in order to modify the list of information defined as state secret. Proposed amendments are not large but in fact they can significantly restrict information accessibility for the wide public.

The bill proposes to classify large volumes of data related to “anti-terroristic activities”. This includes. for example, various financial information. If the bill approved, tax-payers would not be able to know how many money of their taxes were spent to activities of that kind. Also, information on acute issues touching directly any citizen could become available only in official press releases and long after a dangerous incident. Classification of results of inspections checking anyone’s participation in funding terrorism and extremism also is rather questionable.

Ivan Pavlov, IIFD Board Chair, expresses his opinion on the new bill:

“Of course the state should care for sound protection of information on anti-terroristic activities, but large volumes of imformation of that kind are also socially significant. So, any new legal norm should be worded clearly and do not allow ambivalent interpretations.

‘The last provision of the new bill proposing to classify “results of financial monitoring of organizations and individuals checked for their possible complicity for terroristic (extremistic) activities” can baffle anyone. It can mean that an individual or an organization will have no access to information collected about him/her/it just because he/she/it has been only suspected of terrorism. This breaches their basic constitutional rights, Article 24 of the Constitution for example.

‘Not only the bill but the whole Russian legislation on state secret should be amended since in its current shape it is older than the Constitution.

‘This is why civil activists and organizations submitting requests and demanding declassification of documents are so needed to compensate existing informational disbalance formed by the history”.