Figure of the day: In 2021, courts arrested protesters 6 times more often than in 2017

The network edition "Project" found out that at the protests in support of Navalny, which took place in Russia at the beginning of 2021, more people were detained than during the rallies of 2017 and 2019 on a comparable scale combined.

To do this, the journalists of the publication compared the decisions made in the courts, which took place after the most massive protests of the last five years - 2017 (March 26), 2019 (July 27, August 3 and 10) and 2021 (January 23, 31 and 2 February), and found that this year was a record year in several respects.

Thus, this year, Moscow courts considered 5,716 administrative cases initiated against protesters, which is more than twice the number of cases initiated in 2019 (2,466) and 6 times more than those initiated in 2017 (905).

These numbers mean that the courts in 2021 arrested one in three detainees. This is many times higher than the figures for 2017 (9% were arrested), and 5% for 2019. In total, 3751 people were behind the bars this year, while in the previous 62 and 112, respectively. There were more women among the detainees. This year their share is 15% of the total, but before this figure did not exceed 8%. Moreover, slightly less than half of them were arrested by the court, although earlier there were just over 4%...

Human rights activists explain this increase in the number of those arrested by the fact that judges, who have the opportunity to choose between types of punishment, previously relied on fines, and now they began to pass more severe sentences. At the same time, they are increasingly less likely to take into account extenuating circumstances, such as the presence of small children, illnesses, certificates of disability in detainees... They continued to issue arrest warrants, even knowing that the special detention centers of the capital were overcrowded beyond measure.