Chechen police's report about resident of Dagestan outraged social network users

The resident of Dagestan, who refused to be tested for alcohol intoxication, has been suspended from driving, the Chechen police have informed. Social network users have treated the mentioning of the offender's residence as inappropriate.

On the road in the village of Chernokozovo, Naursky District of Chechnya, a car was stopped, driven by a 25-year-old resident of the Kizil-Yurt District of Dagestan. He refused to be tested for alcohol intoxication, the Chechen Ministry of Internal Affairs (MIA) has informed in its website.

The MIA has also reported that in May 2022, the above resident of Dagestan was brought to administrative responsibility for refusing to undergo medical examination and was deprived of his driving license for 1.5 years.

This message was posted by the Instagram* public "ChP/Grozny No. 1". Some users have treated the mentioning of the nationality of the person who was stopped for drunk driving as inappropriate.

Meanwhile, the Chechen Parliament had offered to ban any mentioning of nationalities of criminals and suspects in media. Magomed Daudov, the Parliament Speaker, explained this initiative by "the need to preserve interethnic and interfaith harmony and peace." In April 2022, the Russian government refused to support this bill. This was expected, since there are criminal plots tied specifically to the ethnic component, Nadezhda Azhgikhina, a journalist, has explained. However, the human rights defenders, Ruslan Kutaev and Svetlana Gannushkina**, have pointed out that media often pedal the topic of crimes' ethnicity, which leads to the formation of definite stereotypes in the society.

The "Caucasian Knot" has also reported that the Chechen Parliament started drafting a bill after Ramzan Kadyrov commented on the incident in New Moscow, where a group of young people had beaten up two men. Special services must find provocateurs who had mistakenly called the attackers to be natives of Northern Caucasus, Kadyrov then stated.

*On March 21, 2022, the Tverskoi Court of Moscow banned the activities in Russia of the Meta Company, owning the Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, in connection with extremist activities.

**Included by the Russian Ministry of Justice (MoJ) into the register of foreign agents.