Amid the ongoing Moscow protests, Russian authorities seized custody of protesters’ children.

In August, the Moscow Prosecutor’s Office accused Dmitry and Olga Prokazov and Pyotr and Yelena Khomski of reckless child endangerment, claiming they deliberately brought their children to the protests to avoid arrest, and stripped the two couples of parental custody after they brought their children to the protests. Human right defenders objected to the accusations and argued that the Russian authorities’ underlying objective was not to protect the children but rather to intimidate protesters. According to the Russian Family Code, authorities cannot revoke parental rights of these couples for taking their children to a demonstration.

In both cases, the Prosecutor’s Office filed lawsuits against the parents on the basis of open-source information, primarily videos aired by pro-Kremlin TV channels Rossiya 1 and REN TV. The DFRLab found numerous inconsistences and unsupported claims in both the prosecutor’s official statements and pro-Kremlin outlets’ coverage of the cases.

Dimitry and Olga Prokazov

On July 31, 2019, pro-Kremlin activist and journalist Ilias Mercuri posted a doctored video to Twitter, which Rossiya 1 would use as a basis to support its claims about the organizers of the Moscow protests later that same day. Rossiya 1’s video claimed to show one of the orchestrators of the protests, an unidentified man who was accompanied by a young couple and a child. The video further claimed that the child allegedly served as a decoy to trick police, a tactic it compared to the use of “human shields” by terrorists. , According to independent media outlet Meduza, after Mercuri’s doctored video went viral, independent TV station Dozd undertook an investigation and found that portions of the video had been recorded by Russia’s Center for Combatting Extremism under the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

In a follow-up program on August 3, Rossiya 1 revealed the identity of the anonymous protester to be Sergey Fomin, a staff member in Russian opposition leader Lyubov Sobol’s office, where he was in charge of collecting signatures for Sobol’s nomination as an opposition candidate in the Moscow City Duma elections. Fomin’s parents would later clarify that their son became a political activist in Summer 2019.

Merkouri’s tweet reads: “The unrest in Moscow had specific coordinators, who regulated movement of the crowd and organized breakouts from the cordons. One of them was hiding from police with the help of a stranger’s child.” (Source: @imerkouri/archive)

The video subtitles emphasized that the young couple had agreed to use their child to help Fomin pass through the area cordoned off by police without being detained.

On August 5, Moscow’s Investigative Committee charged Fomin in absentia for participating in a “massive riot” on July 27. Relying on open-source video footage, the Investigative Committee claimed that, “while leaving the rally, Sergey Fomin picked up a stranger’s [emphasis added] small child to pass safely through the police cordon.” The following day, the Moscow City Prosecutor’s Office released a statement noting that it had asked the Perovsky District Court of Moscow to revoke the parental custody of the couple in the video, without providing any details about their identity.

The text of the statement read: “The father of the boy does not have the right to vote in the elections scheduled for September 2019 in Moscow, inasmuch as he has only temporary residency in Moscow. During the rally, the parents transferred the young child, who was helpless due to his age, to a third party endangering the health and life of the boy. Having exploited the child, the couple abused their parental rights to the detriment of their son’s interests. These violations served as the basis for the court to deprive of parental rights of spouses.” The Prosecutor’s Office opened a criminal case against Dmitry and Olga Prokazov under two separate articles of Russia’s Criminal Code: Article 125, which regards putting a minor in danger and carries a punishment of up to one year in prison, and Article 156, which regards the inappropriate performance of parental duties and carries a punishment of up to three years in prison.

The Prokazovs confirmed that they walked in the city center together with Fomin on July 27, but when they ran into the unauthorized rally, they did not join it, as they were accompanied by their young son. Instead, they split with Fomin and went in a different direction. The couple further explained that Fomin is Olga Prokazov’s cousin and the godfather of their first child. After some time, they reportedly met Fomin again, handed the boy to him, and left the protest together to head to the Prokazovs’ home.

Lawyers and human rights defenders denounced the charges, arguing that there was no legal basis to revoke the Prozakovs’ parental custody. Anna Kuznetsova, the Children’s Rights Commissioner for the President of the Russian Federation, pointed out that deprivation of parental rights is an extreme measure that is an option of last resort. Kuznetsova also noted that in the vast majority of cases, these measures do not apply to an isolated instance of parental negligence but, rather, to repeated or reckless child endangerment. In the case of the Prokazov family, the Prosecutor’s Office provided no evidence that the Prozakovs had endangered their son.

Russian authorities’ claims in the Prokazov case

There were several indications that Russian authorities’ allegations against the Prokazovs were not made in good faith.

First, the Prosecutor’s Office substantively revised its initial press release on the charges against the Prokazovs. The initial version of the statement alleged that, by transferring the child to a “third person,” — in this case, Fomin — the parents “endangered their son’s life, as well as caused physical and moral harm to him” [emphasis added]. The latter half of the sentence was struck from a revised version — issued the same day as the original — of the press release. The revision also suggested that the Prosecutor had initially intended to present tough charges against the couple but removed the reference “to physical or moral harm” after finding little evidence to support the charges.