A controversial lawmaker from the ruling United Russia party denied on Wednesday media reports he was working on draft legislation that would introduce harsher penalties for blasphemy and desecrating religious sites.
“There is no draft bill. Journalists just built the topic up so that everyone got the impression there was,” State Duma deputy Alexander Sidyakin told RIA Novosti by telephone. “I am not working on this.”
Russian media reports on Tuesday cited a post on Sidyakin’s official Twitter account that read: “I plan to put forward an initiative to toughen the penalties for desecrating religious shrines.”
But Sidyakin said the post related to previous comments on the Pussy Riot case.
“I made some comments after Pussy Riot had danced in the cathedral that punishments for such things needed to be increased,” he said. “But this received a negative reaction from the government and the bill has gone nowhere.”
The reports came just over a week after a Moscow court handed down a two-year sentence to three members of the all-female anti-Putin punk band Pussy Riot, in a case which divided Russian society and sparked a wave of protest actions in support of the group. The group members were jailed after a protest at Moscow’s largest cathedral over Orthodox Church support for Vladimir Putin ahead of the March presidential polls that returned the former KGB officer to the Kremlin for a third term.
Sidyakin’s post also came after four wooden crosses were chopped down in Russia’s regions last week. A senior Moscow priest, Dmitry Smirnov, said the cross attacks amounted to a declaration of war against the Church. Several Church figures have previously called for blasphemy to be made a crime. It is currently an administrative offense punishable by a fine of up to 1,000 rubles ($31).
Sidyakin drafted two laws – one drastically increasing fines for protest-related offenses and the other forcing politically-active NGOs funded with money from outside Russia to declare themselves “foreign agents” or else see their members face huge fines or jail time earlier this year. Both were widely criticized at home and abroad.