STRASBOURG, France (CN) — A Russian activist jailed for spitting on a portrait of President Vladimir Putin was awarded $11,000 on Tuesday for wrongful imprisonment.
Dmitry Karuyev was arrested after he spat on a portrait of the Russian leader during a protest, but the European Court of Human Rights found the act was an expression of his political opinion, not hooliganism.
Karuyev, then 20, was convicted by a Russian court in 2012 of breaching public order for spitting on a portrait of Putin on the eve of his inauguration for his third term. He was taking part in a protest together with other members of the Other Russia, an opposition group established by former members of the banned National Bolshevik Party. As part of the protest, the group set up the portrait outside of the headquarters for Putin’s party, United Russia, in Cheboksary, a port city 400 miles west of Moscow.
Police officers witnessed the incident but didn’t intervene. Karuyev was arrested four hours after the demonstration had ended. He claimed he didn’t spit, but rather sneezed on the portrait. A court convicted him of disturbing public order and sentenced him to 15 days in jail. Karuyev unsuccessfully appealed the verdict.
The story of Karuyev’s protest spread widely on social media, becoming an ongoing joke about “not giving a sneeze about Putin,” an old-fashioned way of saying that you don’t care about something.
The human rights court's seven-judge panel found that the protest was “essentially peaceful and non-violent” and the fact that the police on-site didn’t respond showed that there was no threat to public order.
“The act of spitting on a photograph of a politician in the wake of his re-election should be considered an expression of political opinion,” the ruling states. The Strasbourg-based court was created in 1959 by the European Convention of Human Rights, which protects the political and civil rights of Europeans.
A Russian judge on the panel dissented, writing that “state officials, whether elected by the majority or appointed to public office, are human beings, and they deserve respectful treatment.”
The court ordered Russia to pay Karuyev 10,000 euros ($11,300) in damages and to compensate him 2,400 euros ($2,700) for his legal expenses.
At the time of the protest, Putin was standing in elections despite being constitutionally barred from seeking a third term after serving as president from 2000 until 2008. Four years prior, he backed Dmitry Medvedev as his successor, who was elected in 2007 and then appointed Putin prime minister. The two worked out a deal where Medvedev would back Putin as president after Medvedev’s term was over, a role which Putin has now held consecutively since 2012.
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