Linguistic expertise was a key part of the 2012 trial of Pussy Riot. Wikimedia Commons/Denis Bochkarev. Some rights reserved.The legal regulation of hate speech is one of the challenges that modern European states have to face in order to maintain security in dense, multicultural societies. The lack of timely state or society responses to hate speech can be fraught with the threat of ethnic or religious clashes. At the same time, the freedom of speech is a value that has been enshrined into many constitutions in order to guarantee citizens the ability to express their thoughts and ideas freely. In some countries, the suppression of this fundamental right has also proved itself as a conflict-prevention tool. The January 2015 attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo violently reawakened these debates on the policing of hate speech.
In the Russian socio-legal context, the backlash from the Charlie Hebdo attack brought about the assumption that such an atrocity would not have happened in Russia due to the existing legislative mechanisms for hate speech regulation. The Russian Federal Service for the Supervision of Communications and Mass Media swiftly issued a clarification: “disseminating religious cartoons in the media can be considered…as offending or humiliating for representatives of religious confessions and groups, and is qualified as inciting ethnic and religious hatred.” Drawing on my lengthy research into hate speech in Russia, I will reflect on the word as a crime and object of forensic expertise in Russian courts. The increasing prominence of forensic linguistics is deeply problematic. Are Russian courtrooms uncritically accepting expert but highly subjective advice? Are the decision-makers privileging certain kinds of expertise over other evidence?
The responsibility of the linguist
A characteristic feature of hate speech regulation in Russia is the frequent deployment of forensic linguistics during pretrial investigations and trial hearings. According to information distributed by SOVA Information and Analysis Center, which has been monitoring hate speech and hate crimes since 2002, around three to four court rulings on hate speech are issued each week across the country. The overwhelming majority of these cases involve a linguistics expert, who is summoned to court in order to approve or disapprove the investigator's evidence of hate speech. Sometimes whole groups of academics take part, and they often reach contrary conclusions.
