The story
On 1 January 1997 a new criminal code took effect in Russia. Its Article 228 punished buying or keeping drugs without intent to sell only when the amount was “large”. On paper that looked like the end of prison for small amounts. One Moscow case, which went all the way to the United Nations, shows why it was not.
Ten grams near a house in Moscow
On 27 August 1996 Valentin Ostroukhov, born in 1977, bought 10 grams of marijuana from a stranger. The police found it shortly afterwards near his home. He was tried under the old Soviet-era code, whose Article 224 punished keeping drugs without intent to sell with up to three years of deprivation of liberty or up to two years of correctional labour.
By the time the Tagansky court in Moscow convicted him, on 10 November 1997, the new code was in force. He was sentenced to one year and six months.
What counted as large
| Old code (Article 224) | New code (Article 228) | |
|---|---|---|
| Keeping without intent to sell | Any amount | Only a “large” amount |
| Maximum | Three years | Three years |
Ostroukhov argued that the new code had decriminalised small amounts and should be applied to him. The answer lay in a summary table of 4 June 1997 from a body the case file calls the Standing Committee, which, he said, was used to class his 10 grams as large. The Russian government replied that such tables were scientific recommendations without legal force, and that the courts decide what is small or large.
The Moscow City Court and the Supreme Court held that the act was punishable under both codes. The president of the Moscow City Court added that the new code’s sanction was in fact the heavier one.
The view from Geneva
Ostroukhov, by then serving a sentence in the Komi Republic, took the matter to the UN Human Rights Committee. On 31 March 2005 the Committee declared his complaint inadmissible: how to weigh the evidence and read the national law was for Russian courts, and he had not shown that they acted arbitrarily.
His was not an unusual case. Human Rights Watch later wrote that between 1996 and 2004 a single dose and a hundred kilograms could both be charged in Russia as possession of an especially large amount, and counted about 100,000 drug convictions in the first year after the harsher penalties took effect.
Why the index did not move
Possession for personal use had been a crime since the Soviet decree of 1974, and the 1997 code kept it one for any amount a table called large. Russia’s scores therefore stay the same across this date. They moved only in May 2004, when up to 20 grams of cannabis became an administrative offence, and moved back in 2006.[1][2]
Listed for context. No score change is recorded for Russia here.
References
Checked. The date and the event were compared with a source that was read.