AI calls to dismiss charges from "Taboo Art" organizers

The Human rights organization "The Amnesty International" (AI) calls to dismiss all the charges from Yuri Samodurov and Andrei Yerofeev, organizers of the exhibition "Taboo Art-2006", suspected of "insulting the feelings of believers and kindling of religious hostility." This is stated in the AI's special statement on the occasion.

"Neither Russian nor international human rights legislation assumes any restrictions of the right to self-expression only because someone sees offensive or contradictory," the "Gazeta.Ru" quotes Nicola Duckworth, director of AI's programmes for Europe and the Central Asia, as saying.

In his turn, archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, head of the Synod division on church-and-society mutual relations, said on July 9 that "no indulgence to the defendants should be even discussed." According to his story, Samodurov and Yerofeev refuse to admit their actions "as wrong and inadmissible in the future," the "Interfax" reports.

Another archpriest - Maxim Kozlov, prior of the chapel of St Tatiana at the Moscow State University, - offered to punish the organizers of the exhibition with public works.

"The verdict of guilty is essentially important, but it's also important that it should not be excessively severe in order not to arouse any involuntarily and unjustified sympathy to the convicts and to what they did," Father Maxim said.