MOSCOW, June 24 (RAPSI) – The State Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament, on Friday passed a package of antiterrorist bills introducing among others life sentence for terrorism.
The bills were drafted by Irina Yarovaya, head of the State Duma's Security and Anti-Corruption Committee, and Viktor Ozerov, the Chairperson of the Committee for Security of the Federation Council.
They propose additional ways of fight against terrorist and extremist threats as well as toughen punishment for terrorism and extremism, according to Yarovaya.
The bills introduce a new component of crime, international terrorism, which would be punished with prison terms ranging from 10 years to life.
Financing of international terrorist attacks and recruitment would result in imprisonment for up to 10 years.
The legislation would define new elements of crimes including “failure to report of a terrorist nature.” Offenders would face fines of up to 100,000 rubles ($1,500); compulsory labor or imprisonment for up to one year.
Public calls for terrorism on the Internet and justifying terrorism would result in fines of up to one million rubles or imprisonment for 7 years.
The bills also touch the issue of keeping online correspondence between Internet users and provision of the respective data on demand of certain state authorities.
While the original amendments to the package of anti-terrorist bills introduced by Yarovaya and Ozerov concerned only mobile operators obliging them to keep users data, now they should include “organizers of dissimilation of information in Internet,” i.e. practically all Internet services. It is envisaged that the data including both the correspondence between users and files they exchange be kept for six months.
Internet companies should be obliged to provide law enforcement agencies with decryption keys in case the users’ correspondence or files are encoded. Those failing to provide the authorities with information on decoding of data or using uncertified encryption products should be subject to fines from 3,000 rubles ($47) for individuals to 1 million rubles ($15,500) for legal entities.
