Security forces post factum detained hundreds of people who went to rallies using facial recognition technology – OVD-Info report

Detention of protesters after the end of the action or detention after the fact began to be practiced in 2018. OVD-Info counted 219 such cases in 39 regions of Russia, mostly they were isolated: in connection with one action, one or two people were detained, in exceptional cases the number of detainees reached ten.

Detentions began to be widely used after the fact in 2020 during protests against the arrest of the governor of the Khabarovsk Territory, Sergei Furgal. From July to early December 2020, OVD-Info recorded 121 post factum arrests there, almost twice as many as at the rallies themselves.

The authors of the report note that the Convention for the Protection of Individuals with regard to Automatic Processing of Personal Data, which has also been ratified by Russia, establishes a number of requirements for facial recognition legislation that are not respected in Russia and are ignored by the courts. For example, despite the fact that the period of storage of records from surveillance cameras cannot exceed one (in exceptional cases, two) months, some people were brought to administrative responsibility five months after the action.

As Ekaterina Abashina, a lawyer for Roskomsvoboda, notes, “The use of facial recognition technology against protesters is illegal because this technology is in the gray zone of regulation and there are no clear and specific rules on when it is permissible to use it. And this, in particular, is due to the fact that face recognition technology processes the biometric data of citizens, and according to the law on personal data, this can be done either with the consent of the citizen himself, or in those cases that are established by federal laws. And no [таких] federal laws that would establish as an acceptable case scanning people during rallies in order to impose administrative fines on them.