Experts: Esquire's "Rating of Extremism" shows weakness of Caucasian law enforcers and not real situation

The "Esquire" magazine has published a list of Russian regions ranked by the number of extremist materials, included in the federal list of the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation by decisions of the local courts. In this rating, Caucasus does not look the most extremist part of Russia. Experts believe that the rating does not reflect the real state of things and sooner indicates the problems in the work of law enforcement bodies than the level of prevalence of extremist moods and publications.

The material, published on the magazine's website on April 9, presents an interactive map of the Russian Federation, coloured by different shades of yellow (minimum value) and red (maximum value), depending on how many times the local courts pronounced decisions on recognition of publications as extremist and banned to spread them.

The reddest in the map are the Altai Republic (24 bans in total, i.e., 114 bans if recalculated per one million of population), the Orenburg Region (148/73.4), Ingushetia (30/67.7), and Kabardino-Balkaria (34/39.6).

At the same time, Dagestan with 40 bans (13.6 per one million of population) looks prosperous, not to mention Chechnya, where only two materials were recognized to be extremist, including "the definition 'The Chechen Republic' in the 58th volume of the book edition of the "Great Encyclopaedia" (Moscow, Publishing House "Terra", 2006)".

The data for other regions are as follows: Stavropol Territory - 5/14, Karachay-Cherkessia - 5/10.6 and North Ossetia - 2/2.8.

Kamilzhan Kalandarov, Chairman of the All-Russian public organization of Muslims "Al-Khak" (Justice), believes that a lot of extremist materials has always been distributed namely in Northern Caucasus.

"I think the problem is in low qualification of investigators, and that it is difficult to bring the case to court. As for Chechnya, both experts and investigators have long turned a blind eye to the region and prefer not to get involved with it," Kamilzhan Kalandarov believes.

The Dagestani lawyer Rasul Kadiev partly agrees with the critical assessment of the work of law enforcement bodies: "Our officials from the Prosecutor's Office simply can't work with information databases."

According to Timur Jafarov, the correspondent of the "Interfax-Yug" agency, the number of real extremists is much smaller in the regions with a large number of extremist materials than in Northern Caucasus.