Resident of Dagestan achieves, through the court, police's response about prophylactic registration

Marat Shiraev, a resident of Makhachkala, who has been checked by policemen for several years, was only able to get a written response through the court from the police division that he was not under the so-called "prophylactic registration".

The "Caucasian Knot" has reported that in Dagestan, they were actively using the prophylactic registration, explaining this by the fact that a person wears a beard or visits a mosque. In 2017, the Dagestani Ministry of Internal Affairs (MIA) announced the abandoning of this practice.

In January, 2021, the 31-year-old Marat Shiraev turned to the Human Rights Centre (HRC) "Memorial"* with a request to help him to get rid of the prophylactic registration. A MIA official handed him an answer from the local police division reading that Marat "was not registered at the division, and the police division ran no records of Wahhabis."

The answer may not be entirely truthful, since it concerns only this particular division, while the registration is run by the Dagestani MIA's Information Centre, Galina Tarasova, a lawyer, has noted.

Marat Shiraev has suggested that he was put on the prophylactic registration after in February 2017, he was accused of distributing extremist materials for posting a song by the Chechen author, Timur Mutsuraev, in social media. According to Shiraev, sometimes at checkpoints policemen told him that he was registered as an "extremist".