Human rights lawyers obtain a secret Russian registry of more than 3,000 suspected extremists. The hidden database targets prominent journalists and musicians.

Source: Department One

The human rights group Department One has obtained access to a confidential registry maintained by Russia’s financial monitoring agency, Rosfinmonitoring. It lists people Russian authorities suspect of involvement in terrorism, extremism, or sabotage, or of financing those activities.

Unlike the public list of extremists and terrorists, this registry is unpublished. Department One believes Rosfinmonitoring maintains it under Article 7.4 of Federal Law No. 115-FZ (“On Combating the Legalization [Laundering] of Proceeds from Crime and the Financing of Terrorism”).

Rosfinmonitoring’s Interagency Commission on Combating the Financing of Terrorism decides whom to add to the registry. The agency then sends the lists to financial institutions.

The registry contains personal data and the commission’s decisions. People in the secret registry face almost the same restrictions as those on the public list of extremists and terrorists, including account freezes.

Department One published the “secret registry” as a database searchable by name. It lists more than 3,000 people, including journalists Leonid Parfenov and Andrey Loshak, musicians Boris Grebenshchikov and Vera Musayelyan, film critic Anton Dolin, and director Vitaly Mansky.

Department One lawyer Evgeny Smirnov warned that inclusion in the “secret registry” could mean Russian law enforcement or security agencies have taken an interest in a person and may open a criminal investigation into them.

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Human rights lawyers obtain a secret Russian registry of more than 3,000 suspected extremists. The hidden database targets prominent journalists and musicians.

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