Background

In Sokolovskiy v Russia [2024] ECHR 473 the applicant, Gennadyevich Sokolovskiy, was a content-creator and blogger with a YouTube channel with about 470,000 subscribers. He published a series of videos which were variously critical of believers in general, sectarianism, Muslims, and Patriarch Kirill and Orthodoxy [5], one of which showed him playing Pokémon Go in a church [7]. In 2017 he was convicted under the Russian Criminal Code for insulting religious beliefs and incitement to hatred or enmity, and sentenced to three years and six months’ imprisonment, suspended with a three-year probation period [50]. Continue reading →