Sergey Katsuba

How does law work in authoritarian states, what role does it play and how does it affect lives of ordinary people? In autocracies law is increasingly used as an instrument of power to consolidate the regime, which leads to a gradual decline of the rule of law and democratic institutions. This constitutes a form of political decay. When it happens, the adoption of authoritarian legislation produces negative societal consequences and affects lives of marginalized communities.

One example of that is institutional discrimination - an authoritarian practice that creates inequalities and conditions for political scapegoating of specific groups of people. Institutional discrimination of LGBTQ people is common in authoritarian regimes, it is employed to strengthen the regime and is often done through legal means by introducing discriminatory legal norms. By using legislation that way, authoritarian leaders are able to conceal authoritarian practices under the pretence of legality. These norms are of questionable legal nature and are dangerous as they increase level of hatred and enmity towards the group. It results in negative societal outcomes that can be observed in the emergence of different kinds of violence against the group (physical attacks, collective violence by non-state actors, collective violence by state actors, attempts to extermination, mass atrocities and genocide).

My research explores institutional discrimination against LGBTQ individuals in Russia through three dimensions:

Political – I draw the connection between the persecution of LGBTQ people and the authoritarian regime in Russia. This includes analysing the legislative politics of the Russian Parliament and how the product of lawmaking was affected by the deterioration of democracy in 2011-2022.
Legal – I analyse various legal mechanisms that constitute institutional discrimination, including so-called “gay propaganda law”, a censorship legislation that restricted LGBTQ people in their rights. Grounded in legal theory this part is explanatory and provides insight into distorted legal nature (or the absence of such nature) of legal norms that establish institutional discrimination against LGBTQ individuals.
Societal – I investigate the consequences of this law related to the increase in hate crimes against LGBTQ people across 13 years (2010-2022). First, I describe the quantitative change (the rise of hate crimes) after the introduction of the “gay propaganda law”. I show that compared to the levels before the introduction of the law in question, the number of crimes is at least three times higher. Second, the crimes changed qualitatively. I show that after 2013 there was a rise in premeditated crimes that are often perpetrated by a group of actors specifically targeting individuals based on their sexual orientation. Over the course of three consecutive years (2017, 2018, 2019), there was a noticeable surge in premeditated, organized and collective violence, linked to the actions of hate groups with homophobic ideologies.