Ingushetia: rights defenders criticize verdict on "honour killing"

A two-year conditional imprisonment awarded to a resident of Ingushetia for killing his sister, who has appeared in an operative video about blackmailers' detention, resulted from a wrong qualification of the crime, human rights defenders assert. Facebook users have linked the verdict with indulgence in traditional values.

The "Caucasian Knot" has reported that in 2020, after an attempt to detain a suspect in involvement in a grouping of blackmailers, a video filmed by operative agents appeared on the Internet. An Ingush woman appeared in the video. The next day, on February 8, 2020, she was killed. Her brother has confessed to assassinating his sister and explained that she had disgraced the family's honour.

The Magas City Court has sentenced the brother who killed his sister to two years of freedom restriction for "the murder committed in the affective state," while the lawyers of the "Legal Initiative" project treat the crime as "a hatred-motivated murder."

Human rights defenders have also treated the sentence to the policeman who filmed the video as too lenient. The Magas Court sentenced the policeman to a year and nine months; and he was released right in the courtroom, as he had served the term at the SIZO (pre-trial prison).

Courts in Dagestan, Chechnya and Ingushetia tend to justify "honour killings" by the immoral behaviour of the victims, the authors of the report "Killed by Gossip-2", published in May 2020, believe.

Alexei Karpich, a Facebook user, gave an example of a verdict passed on a similar case in Dagestan. "In Dagestan, a former <policeman> strangled his ex-wife – he was also sentenced to two years of freedom restriction, even not of imprisonment. It seems that, according to Russian courts, the murder of a woman is an offence something in between graffiti on the wall and a theft of a loaf of bread in a store," Alexei has concluded.