Two Russian activists have been found guilty of staging an unlawful protest, in what they claim is an official backlash against their campaign for sexual harassment allegations made against MP Leonid Slutsky to be taken seriously.

Authorities arrested Alena Popova, Anastasiya Glushkova and Anastasiya Alekseeva last week on the charge of having organised a mass event without permission after they protested with a cardboard cutout of Slutsky outside the State Duma in Moscow.



Slutsky has been accused by various women of sexual harassment, prompting a public debate and comparisons with the Harvey Weinstein scandal. The State Duma’s ethics committee cleared Slutsky on accusations levelled by several journalists.



Popova and Glushkova were found guilty at a hearing on Thursday and fined 20,000 roubles (£228) and 10,000 roubles (£114) respectively. Officials were unable to reach a verdict on the charge against Alekseeva, and referred her case back to the police.

The arrests followed an unprecedented outcry over sexual harassment in Russia, where the issue is often laughed off and painted as a pet subject for western liberals at odds with traditional Russian values.



Popova, Glushkova and Alekseeva claim members of “patriotic” organisations had arrived at the protest to intimidate them into giving up their campaign and accused the activists of “working for the west”.

Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, recently suggested the claims against Slutsky were made because complaints about sexual harassment had become “fashionable”.



More than 600 media professionals from outlets such as RBC, TV Rain, RTVI and Echo of Moscow, as well as the Tass news agency, have signed an open letter calling for a boycott of the Russian parliament because of the allegations made against Slutsky, the head of the Duma’s foreign affairs committee.

Russian law demands that a protest of more than two people be granted permission from local authorities before it can go ahead. The three women had been picketing the Russian parliament individually. The activists had made four requests to hold larger protests in Moscow, all of which were denied.



Popova, a prominent women’s rights campaigner who was detained twice before being arrested and charged, told the Guardian: “Without permission for a protest, you can stand alone with a poster, and can pass that poster to another person, but not stand together. We did just that, and our single picket abided by the law.”



“We will keep applying for permission to hold a bigger protest and continue with our single protests in the meantime. We will apply for permission 1,000 times if we have to.”

Kirill Druzhinin, who is involved in the Slutsky protest campaign, said: “The reaction of the government to our campaign is absolutely irresponsible. Instead of giving citizens the opportunity to express their discontent in a legal way, the authorities, under far-fetched pretexts, forbid us from doing so.



“According to Russian human rights organisations, every second woman in Russia [has been] sexually harassed. Authorities believe that recognising the unacceptability of Slutsky’s behaviour means admission to their own weakness, which they cannot do.”



The protests organised by activists seek to attract as much of attention as possible to an “intolerable situation”, Inga Kelehsaeva of Amnesty International said.



“We are deeply saddened but no way surprised by this case – by decriminalising domestic violence last year, the lawmakers have already demonstrated that they support and promote an anti-women agenda in Russia and turn a blind eye to the fact that the modern society has much evolved and all litanies about ‘traditional values’ are deeply outdated.”

