a. Freedom of Speech and Press
See the Country Reports on Human Rights for Russia for a description of the relevant Russian laws and procedures that the Russian government applied and enforced in occupied Crimea.
Occupation authorities significantly restricted freedom of expression and subjected dissenting voices including the press to harassment and prosecution. They refused to register independent print and broadcast media outlets, forcing them to cease operations. Threats and harassment against international and Ukrainian journalists were common.
Freedom of Expression: The HRMMU noted that occupation authorities placed “excessive limitations on the freedoms of opinion and expression.” Individuals could not publicly criticize the Russian occupation without fear of reprisal. Human rights groups reported the FSB engaged in widespread surveillance of social media, telephones, and electronic communication and routinely summoned individuals for “discussions” for voicing or posting opposition to the occupation.
During the year human rights monitors observed an increase in prosecutions and convictions for opinions expressed in social media posts, at times for posts that were written before Russia began its occupation of Crimea. For example, on May 4, a court in Sevastopol sentenced Ihor Movenko to two years in a minimum security prison for commenting on a social network that “Crimea is Ukraine.”
There were reports that authorities detained individuals for “abusing” the Russian flag or other symbols of the Russian occupation. For example on July 26, the FSB raided the homes of four Crimean Tatar teenagers in Belogorsk District after the youth allegedly removed the Russian flag from the city hall in the village of Kurskoye and threw it into a pit latrine. During the raids two residents of the homes were detained for interrogation and then released.
Press and Media Freedom: Independent print and broadcast media could not operate freely. Occupation authorities refused to register most independent media outlets, forcing them to close in 2015. According to the Crimean Human Rights Group, after the occupation of Crimea began, many local journalists left Crimea or abandoned their profession. With no independent media outlets left in Crimea and professional journalists facing serious risks for reporting from the peninsula, public activists began reporting on developments in Crimea. The HRMMU noted in a September report on Crimea that there was “continued interference in journalistic activity and a lack of independent reporting.”
The small monthly Ukrainian language newsletter Krymsky Teren, published by the Ukrainian Cultural Center, suspended publication on June 30 after members of the center and their publishing house were warned not to engage in “extremist activities” and threatened. In early December the newsletter resumed publication. On August 29, FSB agents searched the apartment of the editor of Krymsky Teren, Olha Pavlenko, whom they claimed had ties to a Ukrainian nationalist organization. After the search authorities interrogated Pavlenko and confiscated and copied her cell phone and computer. On September 2, she left for mainland Ukraine, citing fears for her safety.
Violence and Harassment: There were numerous cases of Russian security forces or police harassing independent media and detaining journalists in connection with their professional activities. For example, the HRMMU’s September report described an interview with an undercover reporter monitoring trials of Crimean Tatars accused of terrorism, who was questioned by police about his journalistic activity. He was “warned” about the consequences of “wandering around” court hearings and released after writing an explanatory note.
There were reports that authorities failed to investigate violence against journalists. For example, on February 1, journalist Evgeniy Gaivoronskiy reported that an unknown assailant had pushed him to the ground and kicked him multiple times in the center of Yalta. Gaivoronskiy had been receiving threats for several months before the attack. According to press reports, Gaivoronskiy had a history of employment at pro-Russian publications, but he had recently come into conflict with a local real estate developer, Dmitriy Tiukayev, because of his critical reporting on Tiukayev’s building projects. Gaivoronskiy reported the attack to police but said they refused to open an investigation.
Censorship or Content Restrictions: Following Russia’s occupation of Crimea, journalists overwhelmingly resorted to self-censorship to continue reporting and broadcasting.
There were reports that media outlets were pressured to remove stories that angered powerful political figures. According to press reports on September 23, local Feodosiya newspaper Gorod-24 published a report about a luxury construction project that fit the description of a home being built for Dmitry Kiselyov, head of the government-owned media agency. According to the article’s author, authorities forced the newspaper’s editor to purchase all printed copies of the paper at her own expense and then arranged her firing. Kiselyov filed a complaint with police, claiming the journalist was engaging in an extortion attempt.
Russian occupation authorities banned most Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar-language broadcasts, replacing the content with Russian programming. According to Crimean Human Rights Group media monitoring, during the year occupation authorities began to jam the signal of four previously accessible Ukrainian radio stations by transmitting Russian radio stations at the same frequencies.
Human rights groups reported Russian authorities forbade songs by Ukrainian singers from playing on Crimean radio stations.
Censorship of independent internet sites became more widespread (see Internet Freedom).
National Security: Authorities cited laws protecting national security to justify retaliation against opponents of Russia’s occupation.
The Russian Federal Financial Monitoring Service (RosFinMonitoring) included prominent critics of the occupation on its list of extremists and terrorists. This prevented these individuals from holding bank accounts, using notary services, and conducting other financial transactions. On September 6, RosFinMonitoring added the names of five critics of the occupation to the list, including Larisa Kitaiska, a local businesswoman convicted of extremism for making comments critical of the occupation that authorities deemed “Russophobic.”
Authorities frequently used the threat of “extremism” or “terrorism” as grounds to justify raids, arrests, and prosecutions of individuals in retaliation for their opposition to the occupation. For example on May 21, Russian security forces raided the houses of Crimean Solidarity activists and bloggers Server Mustafayev and Edem Smailov in Bakhchisaray District and detained them. As of late September, both remained in detention and had been charged with participating in the activities of the Islamic group Hizb ut-Tahrir, which is banned in Russia but legal in Ukraine. Human rights monitors believed that the case against them was politically motivated.
INTERNET FREEDOM
Russian occupation authorities restricted free expression on the internet by imposing repressive laws of the Russian Federation on Crimea (see section 2.a. of the Country Reports on Human Rights for Russia). Security services routinely monitored and controlled internet activity to suppress dissenting opinions. According to media accounts, occupation authorities interrogated residents of Crimea for posting pro-Ukrainian opinions on Facebook or in blogs.
More than 30 Ukrainian online outlets were among the hundreds that Russian federal authorities blocked in Crimea, including several sites that were not on Russian federal internet block list.
ACADEMIC FREEDOM AND CULTURAL EVENTS
Russian authorities in Crimea engaged in a widespread campaign to suppress the Crimean Tatar and Ukrainian languages. While Crimean Tatar and Ukrainian are official languages in occupied Crimea, authorities continued to reduce instruction in schools and offered the languages only as optional instruction at the end of the school day. The Mejlis reported authorities continued to pressure Crimean Tatars to use the Cyrillic, rather than the Latin, alphabet.
Despite an April 2017 order by the International Court of Justice to ensure access to education in Ukrainian, there was only one Ukrainian school with Ukrainian as a language of instruction and 13 classes offered Ukrainian as a subject in the curriculum. According to occupation authorities, there were 16 Crimean Tatar schools in the peninsula in the 2017-2018 academic year as compared with 52 in the 2014-2015 academic year. The Crimean Tatar Resource Center reported, however, that this number was substantially inflated.
b. Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and Association
FREEDOM OF PEACEFUL ASSEMBLY
See the Country Reports on Human Rights for Russia for a description of the relevant Russian laws and procedures that the Russian government applied and enforced in occupied Crimea.
Individuals opposing the occupation reported widespread harassment and intimidation by occupation authorities to suppress their ability to assemble peacefully. For example, the press reported on October 11 that authorities in Armyansk had issued a warning to a local resident, Yekaterina Pivovar, not to violate laws governing public protests. Pivovar had allegedly been planning to organize a group of local mothers to assemble outside city hall to demand a meeting with local officials. The mothers were concerned about the impact of toxic sulfur dioxide gas being released since late August from a nearby titanium plant on the health of their children.
A 2017 regulation limits the places in Crimea where public events may be held to 366 listed locations. The HRMMU noted that the “regulation” restricted freedom of assembly to a shrinking number of “specially designated spaces,” an unnecessary move that appeared “designed to dissuade the exercise of the right of freedom of assembly.”
Authorities fined individuals for conducting single-person pickets, the only type of protest that is supposed to be permitted without official permission under the legal system that Russia has imposed on occupied Crimea. According to the HRMMU, between December 2017 and March, occupation “courts” fined 80 Muslim men, who had conducted single-person pickets in October 2017 to protest the arrests of other Muslim men, mostly Crimean Tatars, for alleged membership in terrorist or extremist organizations.
There were reports of occupation authorities using coercive methods to provide for participation at rallies in support of the “government.” Students, teachers and civil servants were forced to attend a commemoration event on the day of deportation of the Crimean Tatars organized by Crimean-occupation authorities in Simferopol on May 18.
There were reports that occupation authorities charged and fined individuals for allegedly violating public assembly rules in retaliation for gathering to witness security force raids on homes.
FREEDOM OF ASSOCIATION
See the Country Reports on Human Rights for Russia for a description of the relevant Russian laws and procedures that the Russian government applied and enforced in occupied Crimea.
Occupation authorities broadly restricted freedom of association for individuals that opposed the occupation. For example, there were numerous reports of authorities taking steps to harass, intimidate, arrest, and imprison members of the human rights group Crimean Solidarity, an unregistered movement of friends and family of victims of repression by occupation authorities. Two of the group’s leaders, Emir-Usain Kuku and Server Mustafayev, remained in pretrial detention as of November on charges of allegedly belonging to the Islamic organization Hizb ut-Tahrir. Human rights monitors believed the cases against both men to be politically motivated and without basis. On January 27, law enforcement officers in Sudak disrupted a Crimean Solidarity civic group meeting attended by 150 persons. Law enforcement officers allegedly searched for drugs and weapons and questioned and photographed participants at the gathering. On October 27, in Simferopol, officials from the “prosecutor general’s office” accompanied by a contingent of armed men in masks and uniformed police raided another Crimean Solidarity meeting. The officials issued formal warnings to three members of the group, whom authorities claimed were poised to violate “counterterrorism and counterextremism” legislation by purportedly planning to hold a series of single-person pickets. On October 28, occupation authorities blocked the group’s website.
The Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar people remained banned for purported “extremism” despite an order by the International ?ourt of Justice requiring that Russian authorities “refrain from maintaining or imposing limitations on the ability of the Crimean Tatar community to conserve its representative institutions, including the Mejlis.” On October 29, occupation authorities announced plans to “nationalize” the Mejlis building in Simferopol, which they had seized in 2014, by transferring it to a Muslim organization that supported the occupation. Following the 2016 ban on the Crimean Tatar Mejlis as an “extremist organization,” occupation authorities banned gatherings by Mejlis members and prosecuted individuals for discussing the Mejlis on social media (see section 6).
d. Freedom of Movement, Internally Displaced Persons, Protection of Refugees, and Stateless Persons
Russian occupation authorities did not respect rights related to freedom of movement and travel.
In-country Movement: Occupation authorities maintained a state border at the administrative boundary between mainland Ukraine and Crimea. According to the HRMMU, this border and the absence of public transportation between Crimea and mainland Ukraine continued to undermine freedom of movement to and from the peninsula, affecting mainly the elderly, people with limited mobility, and young children.
There were reports occupation authorities selectively detained and at times abused persons attempting to enter or leave Crimea. According to human rights groups, Russian authorities routinely detained adult men at the administrative boundary for additional questioning, threatened to seize passports and documents, seized telephones and memory cards, and questioned them for hours. For example, according to the HRMMU, on March 8, the FSB detained a Crimean Tatar man for 12 hours and subjected him to physical violence in order to force him to testify against Crimean Tatar acquaintances suspected of being members of “radical” Muslim groups.
Occupation authorities prohibited entry into Crimea by Mustafa Jemilev and Refat Chubarov, members of the Verkhovna Rada, and the former and current chairmen of the Crimean Tatar Mejlis, respectively; by Crimean Tatar activist Sinaver Kadyrov; and by Ismet Yuksel, general director of the Crimean News Agency, on the pretext that they would incite radicalism.
According to the HRMMU, Ukrainian legislation restricts access to Crimea to three designated crossing points and imposes sanctions, including long-term entry bans, in case of noncompliance. Crimean residents lacking Ukrainian passports, who only possess Russian-issued Crimean travel documents not recognized by Ukrainian authorities, often faced difficulties when crossing into mainland Ukraine.
Citizenship: Russian occupation authorities required all residents of Crimea to be Russian citizens. Those who refused Russian citizenship could be subjected to arbitrary expulsion. Multiple citizens of Ukraine were deported from Crimea for violating the Russian Federation’s immigration rules. According to the Crimean Human Rights Group, during the first four years of Russia’s occupation, over 2,000 Ukrainians were prosecuted for not having Russian documents and 336 persons have been deported.
On February 13, the Yevpatoria city court ruled against 23 citizens of Ukraine. They were fined 5,000 Russian rubles ($76) each and administratively expelled to mainland Ukraine for working without a labor license.
Residents of Crimea who chose not to adopt Russian citizenship were considered foreigners. In some cases, they could obtain a residency permit. Persons holding a residency permit without Russian citizenship, however, were deprived of key rights and could not own agricultural land, vote or run for office, register a religious congregation, or reregister a private vehicle. Authorities denied those who refused Russian citizenship access to government employment, education, and health care, as well as the ability to open bank accounts and buy insurance, among other limitations.
According to the Crimean Human Rights Group, Russian authorities prosecuted private employers who continued to employ Ukrainians. Fines could be imposed on employers for every recorded case of employing a Ukrainian citizen without a labor license. Fines in such cases amounted to several million dollars.
In some cases, authorities compelled Crimean residents to surrender their Ukrainian passports, complicating international travel, because many countries did not recognize passports issued by Russian occupation authorities.
INTERNALLY DISPLACED PERSONS (IDPS)
Approximately 27,600 residents of Crimea registered as IDPs on the mainland, according to the Ministry of Social Policy. The Mejlis and local NGOs, such as Krym SOS, believed the actual number could be as high as 100,000, as most IDPs remained unregistered. Many individuals fled due to fear that occupation authorities would target them for abuse because of their work as political activists or journalists. Muslims, Greek Catholics, and Evangelical Christians who left Crimea said they feared discrimination due to their religious beliefs.
Crimean Tatars, who made up the largest number of IDPs, said they were concerned about pressure on their community, including an increasing number of arbitrary searches of their homes, surveillance, and discrimination. In addition, many professionals left Crimea because Russian occupation authorities required them to apply for Russian professional licenses and adopt Russian procedures in their work.