Extremist and Terrorist Crimes in the Courts Decisions Statistics

Abstract

The subject of the study is the statistical data on the state of criminal courts records in Russia in their dynamics for 2017-2021. The relevance of the study is due to the allocation in the National Security Strategy of the Russian Federation from 2021 of an independent section dedicated to information security, as well as an indication in it of the threat in the form of extremist and terrorist activities carried out on the Internet. Achieving the goal of defining and specifying this threat required the fulfillment of tasks in the form of: establishing a list of extremist and terrorist information crimes; detecting trends in the number and age of convicts, as well as their distribution in different years according to these compositions. The study found that after a significant decrease in the number of convicts for extremist and terrorist information crimes in 2019, their number last year again approached the numbers of 2017. The distribution of convicts under articles of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation has undergone serious changes over the past 5 years. It was found that among those convicted of crimes of extremist and terrorist orientation in 2021, the proportion of those who committed crimes using the Internet increased 5 times compared to 2017, reaching a value of 72.21%. The share of those convicted of such crimes over the age of 29 increased from 28.86% in 2018 to 55.89% in 2021. The share of juvenile convicts, on the contrary, decreased, not reaching 5% in 2021. The results of the study allowed us to confirm the increased threat to information security in the form of extremist and terrorist activities carried out on the Internet. The obtained data on the age of convicts can be used to adjust preventive measures of anti-extremist and anti-terrorist orientation, which today are mainly focused on schoolchildren and students.