Update 4/6/10: The Federation Council, Russia’s upper house of parliament, turned down the State Duma’s bill during it’s Tuesday session. Mihkail Kapura, deputy chairman of the judicial committee, cited a lack of viability to implement such restrictions and the danger of bringing about the destruction of free speech.

A new law passed on Monday by the Russian State Duma will ban the media from reproducing any statements whatsoever issued by anyone deemed to be a terrorist, ITAR-TASS reports.

The bill was written by Robert Shlegel, a member of the leading United Russia party and former press secretary for the pro-Kremlin youth movement Nashi. It will amend current legislation governing the media to include a ban on “the distribution of any material from persons wanted for or convicted of participating in terrorist activities.”

Shlegel said that the March 29 suicide bombings on the Moscow metro, which killed 40 people and injured more than 100, was the impetus for the bill. He said that he opposes giving a spotlight in the media to Doku Umarov, the Chechen rebel leader who has claimed responsibility for the attacks. He also criticized Google for allowing its YouTube video service to host a recording of Umarov’s post-March 29 statement.

“News about militants should consist only of reports about their destruction,” Shlegel concluded.

Amidst the heightened criticism at the Russian government’s failure to address terrorism originating in the country’s volatile North Caucasus region, some Kremlin supporters have accused the press of being terrorist collaborators. In particular, State Duma Speaker and United Russia member Boris Gryzlov singled out columnist Aleksandr Minkin of the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper as collaborating with the terrorists responsible for the March 29 attacks. Minkin has demanded an apology from Gryzlov and threatened to sue him for slander. Gryzlov has threatened a counter suit. Additionally, United Russia member Andrei Isayev has threatened that party members might sue Minkin for being a terrorist collaborator.

Director Oleg Panfilov of the Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations said that the new law will turn Russia into a country like North Korea and was another example of Shlegel’s “routine stupidity.” “It immediately raises the question,” he said, “Who do we label as terrorists? Those convicted by the court, or those that the bureaucrats consider to be terrorists?”

Secretary Mikhail Fedotov of the Russian Union of Journalists explained that nothing good could result from Russian society being deprived of information about the positions and confessions of alleged terrorists. “Society should know the face of its villains and understand what kind of evil it is being confronted with,” he stressed.

Even without the new law, the Russian media already faces complications with the authorities’ interpretation of current media legislation. Reports surfaced late Monday that the federal communications supervisory agency Roskomnadzor has accused the online edition of the Argumenty Nedeli newspaper of extremism for posting a video of Umarov’s statement. According to the agency, posting the video violates a law prohibiting the media from being used for extremist activity. The law, however, is criticized by oppositionists and human rights groups as being so vague as to allow the government to define extremism however they’d like, and has resulted in crackdowns on a wide variety of groups and individuals critical of the Kremlin.

“Well-known circumstances do not allow us to do this [to ratify the protocol – Ed.],” said Gryzlov. “The issue has to do with terrorist activity in Russia.”

Russia has had a moratorium on the death penalty since 1996, when it joined the Council of Europe under the condition that it would work to prohibit capital punishment. Since then, however, the practice was never banned outright. Gryzlov stressed that despite this, the majority of other obligations that Russia agreed to upon joining the Council had been fulfilled. “For sure, we haven’t ratified the sixth protocol; however, the problem is being resolved differently, but it is being resolved” by continuing the moratorium, he said.

The Russian Constitutional Court ruled last November to extend a moratorium on capital punishment, which had been set to expire in January 2010. The move overruled the court’s original decision in 1999 to allow the introduction of the death penalty if every region of Russia had provisions allowing for jury trials, which Chechnya, the last region without them, was planning to introduce at the beginning of this year.

A January poll by the research center VTsIOM estimated that 44 percent of Russians support a full introduction of the death penalty, with 18 percent in opposition. The majority of those in favor consist of members of the Communist party and elderly Russians, while most of those opposed are members of the opposition parties Yabloko, Right Cause, and Patriots of Russia, as well as young adults. Support for the death penalty in relation to terrorism, however, is relatively higher. In 2005, when VTsIOM estimated public support for capital punishment to stand at 84 percent, 96 percent of respondents were in favor of using the death penalty as punishment for acts of terrorism.

According to a poll conducted by the independent Levada Center and released on March 18, the majority of the 27 percent of protest-minded Russians consisted of young people between the ages of 18 and 24 who lived in large cities such as Moscow and St. Petersburg. Middle-aged Russians who were moderately educated and had low incomes were the next largest demographic, while residents of small towns and adults with high salaries were the least likely to have any interest in demonstrations.

Expectations that large-scale protests would actually be held was up by 5 percent in the last half year, and Russians’ willingness to participate in them was up 3-4 percent, said the report.

Levada Center Deputy Director Aleksei Grazhdankin said that while the rise in pro-protest sentiments was typical for the spring, the increased belief that demonstrations of a meaningful size would actually be held was notable.

“This is explained by the fact that protests, for example in Kaliningrad, have become more visible,” said Grazhdankin. He also said that the survey indicates a marked rise in both the amount and quality of information concerning large-scale demonstrations.

In what has been dubbed the United Day of Protest, massive demonstrations are planned for Saturday in cities throughout Russia. Those taking part include a vast range of opposition parties, trade unions, human rights advocates, civic organizations, and ordinary Russians in protest against falling standards of living, suppression of human rights, unfair tariffs, environmental degradation, and the continued monopolization of the Kremlin’s United Russia party over the political life of the country. They are protesting in support of the call for Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to resign.

The protest planned to take place in central Moscow on Pushkin Square has been banned by city authorities. While organizers were in negotiations with the mayor’s office on Friday, they said the demonstration would be held regardless of the outcome. Representatives of the Moscow City Police meanwhile promised that, if held, the rally would be dispersed and its organizers brought to court. Protests have also been banned under various pretenses in the cities of Kazan, Vladivostok, and Kaliningrad.

In an online interview held by the news website Gazeta.ru and published on Friday, State Duma Speaker and United Russia member Boris Gryzlov said that oppositionists were being paid large sums of money to organize protests against the government.

“There is reliable information – and as a member of the Safety Committee I know it – that sufficiently serious money is paid for participation in these rallies,” said Gryzlov during the conference. He went on to claim that oppositionists are unable to come to terms with the fact that United Russia does so well at the polls and therefore attempt to draw people out into the streets.

“It’s a dangerous development of events,” Gryzlov went on, referring to a recent increase in the size and number of anti-government demonstrations. “Here we sense the color and taste of the colored revolutions. And we sense those same ideologues that get money from a large number of non-governmental organizations from abroad, and create tension with this money that attracts specific citizens to the rallies.”

Gryzlov added that the ultimate goal of opposition parties was to “weaken the state.”

Organizers of opposition demonstrations in Russia have long been suppressed by the government. Moscow city authorities have turned down each of the half-dozen applications filed by the Other Russia opposition coalition within the past year to protest in defense of the constitutional right to freedom of assembly, including one planned for later this month, and police arrested 160 participants in a sizable demonstration last January.

Friday’s decision makes Russia the last and final member of the Council of Europe to sign the protocol, opening the way for the court to adopt a series of much-needed reforms.

Russian legislators initially refused to sign the protocol in December 2006, saying that the reforms would infringe upon Russian interests.

Specifically, the protocol would provide for a committee of three judges to decide whether or not to consider a complaint that had been filed in the court. Russian deputies also objected to a provision allowing the court to further investigate a complaint before it decided whether or not to take it under consideration.

Statements earlier in the week by State Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov met with initial skepticism, with analysts fearing that the rhetoric echoed similar statements by Duma deputies that had previously gone unfulfilled.

The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg has handed down a vast number of rulings against Russia for rights abuses. It has ruled against Russia more than 120 times in cases related to Chechnya alone. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has accused the court of making “politicized” decisions.

According to the RFE/RL news service, the Duma’s decision to finally ratify the protocol is likely political. In particular, a pending $98 billion case from the former oil company Yukos against Russia that accuses the country of driving it into bankruptcy through unfair prosecution is a likely factor.

“The consideration of the Yukos case has been postponed for months on various pretexts. Now that all the possibilities of delays have run out, the ratification lever is being used,” says Russian political analyst Nikolai Petrov. “The Kremlin is interested in mollifying the European Court as much as possible by improving Russia’s image with the judges.”

According to the article, Vladimir Pligin, chairman of the Duma Constitutional Legislation Committee and a member of the Kremlin-backed United Russia party, stated that it would be more advisable to create such a committee under the president.

A presidential electoral monitoring committee, Pligin says, would deal with the implementation of electoral legislation. It would include representatives of the presidential administration, members of the Central Elections Commission (TsIK), and representatives from various parliamentary parties.

An anonymous source in the Kremlin confirmed to Vedomosti that the presidential committee would mainly work to implement reforms proposed by President Dmitri Medvedev in his state of the union address on November 12, in hopes of meeting his deadline of April 2010. According to TsIK member Gennady Raykov, the TsIK itself has yet to receive any instructions concerning the reforms.

In response to complaints by the Communist Party over fraudulent elections in October, State Duma representative and United Russia member Boris Gryzlov had earlier proposed that an electoral monitoring committee be created in the State Duma. After two months of negotiations, no committee was created.

A presidential committee similar to the one described by Pligin was implemented in 2000, which, according to Communist party lawyer and Duma representative Vadim Solovyov, worked effectively. However, in his opinion, a State Duma committee would serve a different purpose: not only would it be able to implement amended legislation, but it could also refer alleged violations to the TsIK and the appropriate law enforcement agencies. “Gryzlov, in his innocence,” says Solovyov, “made the proposal; but United Russia simply got scared.”

In his brief to Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, Bortnikov said that suspects Yevgeniya Khasis and Nikita Tikhonov were detained as a result of police infiltration of a “radical organization.” Khasis then admitted to the murder of lawyer Stanislav Markelov and journalist Anastasia Baburova.

Khasis, born 1985, is now being guarded in detention ahead of trial. She and Tikhonov, born 1980, are allegedly former members of the radical nationalist organization Russian National Unity. Police say they have confiscated a large quantity of weapons and that the suspects had planned to commit yet another “resonant” murder.

Reports began appearing in the Russian media several weeks prior to the FSB statement that murder suspects had possibly been detained. The media had named the motive for the crime as retaliation on the part of nationalists for Markelov’s involvement in the murder case of anti-fascist Aleksandr Ryukhin.

Ryukhin, who was 19 at the time of his killing, was knifed down by a group of six nationalists in 2006. Only three of the six were sentenced, and Markelov had repeatedly named Tikhonov as another possible suspect. Investigators said Tikhonov had been a member of the notorious ultranationalist organization United Brigade-88 and was a close friend to Khasis. Khasis herself had allegedly been a member of various nationalist groups since she was 16.

According to Aleksandr Belov, leader of the Movement Against Illegal Immigration, Tikhonov had worked as a speech writer for Boris Gryzlov. Gryzlov at the time had been chief of Russian police and Russia’s Interior Minister, and is currently Speaker of the State Duma and a leader of Putin’s United Russia party. Belov says that Tikhonov had “disappeared somewhere” in 2006.

Investigators had originally suspected Markelov’s murder to be motivated his involvement in the case of a girl killed by a Russian colonel in Chechnya.

An anonymous source told Kasparov.ru that Tikhonov and Khasis were likely arrested long prior to the officially cited dates of November 3 and 4, and that the media deliberately waited until after yesterday’s massive nationalist demonstrations to release the information.

Stanislav Markelov was shot in the head with a pistol in central Moscow on January 19 of this year. He died at the scene. Novaya Gazeta journalist Anastasia Baburova, who was walking with Markelov, was also shot, and died the same day in the hospital.

Novaya Gazeta Editor-in-Chief Sergei Sokolov was careful in his reaction to the FSB Director’s announcement. “I would beware of talking about a full exposure of this crime. If you bring to mind other different notorious murders – frequently after the announcement of their exposures, they don’t hold up in practice.”

He also said, however, that the election results did indeed “reflect citizens’ political party preferences.”

These comments follow Medvedev’s weekend meeting with leaders both from opposition parties and parties normally loyal to the Kremlin. Despite being presented with 120 counts of electoral fraud, he stated that the election results would not be annulled. Vladimir Zhirinovsky, leader of the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) and close Putin ally, was a surprising critic of the elections. According to Zhirinovsky, the president stated that election annulments “do not, in principle, happen anywhere in the world, and that the situation has to do with the fact that we must use the judicial process – and we are using it in full force.”

Medvedev did agree that the elections had not been ideal.

Boris Gryzlov, Chairman of the Supreme Council of Putin’s United Russia party, said that by having the meeting, Medvedev had “fulfilled his constitutional role as guarantor of the Constitution.” He proposed that anyone in disagreement over the election results turn to the courts, stressing that there should not be any “political disorder.”

Medvedev requested at the beginning of the meeting that party representatives not turn the discussion into a funeral for democracy. “I intentionally dressed darkly today, thinking that, who knows, you all might be in the mood for a funeral,” said the president.

Deputies from LDPR, A Just Russia, and the Communist party walked out of an October 14 session of the State Duma in a sign of contempt at the election results of October 11. However, after a telephone call with the president the next day, LDPR and A Just Russia agreed to return to their posts; the Communist party returned for the sake of budget discussion.

Elections took place on October 11 in Moscow and 75 other regions of Russia for officials on various levels of government. They delivered sweeping wins for United Russia across the country, continuing the political monopoly it has held since its conception in 2001. Observers noted massive electoral violations, including ballot stuffing and multiple voting with the same absentee ballot.

In Moscow, the majority of opposition candidates had been banned from the ballot. Widespread electoral fraud quickly became clear and has now been statistically documented. Numerous incontrovertible examples highlight the unabashed nature of these violations – opposition party Yabloko, for one, received no votes even at the polling station where its leader, Sergei Mitrokhin, had voted.