Mizulina: Internet use - an aggravating circumstance when committing crimes

Senator Elena Mizulina, Deputy Chairman of the Council of the Federation Committee on Constitutional Legislation, launched a new initiative to amend Russian legislation.

Today at the Safe Internet Forum in the section “Prospects and Further Steps of Russian-Chinese Cooperation in the Field of Information and Communication Technologies” Mizulina informed those present that in the near future the Federation Council will prepare a bill in which the use of the Internet in crime will be considered an aggravating circumstance. Corresponding amendments are planned to be made in Article 63 of the Criminal Code (“Circumstances aggravating criminal punishment”).

According to Art. 63 of the Criminal Code, aggravated circumstances are:

• recidivism;
• the commission of a crime in a group of persons;
• out of revenge;
• with extreme cruelty;
• using uniforms or documents of a representative of the authorities;
• using weapons;
• etc.

Mizulina proposes to add the list with the phrase “using the Internet”, so that whenever a crime was committed with the help of the Internet, the commission of crimes was facilitated, the crime was organized, it was taken into account when sentencing, ”she said.

In addition, Mizulina proposes to introduce “personal responsibility for the owners of resources that host information that encourages suicide,” including for owners of social networks. In her opinion, this is a gap in the Criminal Code, which provides for responsibility only for incitement to suicide of a specific person, and not for disseminating information in general.

Here are some previous initiatives of MP Mizulina:

• Amendments to the law “On the protection of children from information harmful to their health and development” in order to block sites with obscene language .
  
  
• The initiative is to protect Russian children from computer games, where "there is cruelty, scenes of violence, propaganda of a negative image of Russia and containing extremist materials."
  
  
• The proposal to equate hentai cartoons to child pornography and punish for viewing and storing such materials with imprisonment from 3 to 10 years .