We aggregated court decisions penalising people and organisations for the so-called “LGBT propaganda” in Russia over twelve years. Our paper describing the data collection and representation has been published in the SEMANTiCS conference proceedings and received the Best Poster award.
The Russian authorities censor a wide range of LGBTQIA+ expression. For example, individuals are penalised for posting same-sex imagery on social media, appearing in gender non-conforming clothing in public, or attending queer venues; companies are fined for distributing queer-related content, such as books, films, or merchandise. Judges issue penalties based on the legislation banning the so-called “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations and/or preferences, sex change, or refusal to have children”. This legislation was enacted in 2013. Since then, courts have issued hundreds of penalties: not only fines, but also detention or even expulsion from the country, if defendants are non-nationals. We launched the monitoring of such cases to systematise them and enable research into this type of administrative persecution.
We described the process of collecting persecution incidents from open sources and building a dataset in the peer-reviewed academic paper “Using Linked Data for Monitoring Administrative Persecution Targeting LGBTQIA+ Expression”, now published open access. We presented this paper as a poster at the annual computer science conference SEMANTiCS, taking place September 15–17 in Ghent, Belgium.
Dataout’s presentation has been recognised with the Best Poster award by the conference participants and organisers. Our poster is available on the conference website.
Persecution incidents as a knowledge graph
Information about penalties under Russia’s so-called “LGBT propaganda” laws is scattered across thousands of court websites, mass media and social media publications, and NGO reports. Using our custom-developed software and manual research, we identified and verified 316 incidents of persecution spanning twelve years, from 2014 to 2025. For each incident, we recorded key details: who was penalised, for what actions, when, under which legal provision, and what penalty was imposed. We also documented and archived the sources of each incident.
We put all gathered incidents into a knowledge graph, a data structure with nodes and edges that explicitly connects incidents and their associated entities, such as people, organisations, courts, reasons for initiating administrative proceedings, penalties, and sources. For example, a court document and a person are two nodes. They are connected with the edge “has defendant”, which makes it clear that a person is mentioned in a court document as a defendant. Thanks to such connections in the knowledge graph, we can systematically study patterns of persecution. For example, we can retrieve incidents involving the same defendant, or in which people were fined for posting on social media. One of the patterns we identified is courts penalising companies and their affiliated employees for the same “violation” in 39 instances (78 court decisions). An example is when both a Moscow bookshop and its director were fined for distributing books on queer and feminist topics.
We have openly released the dataset and documented its development, so that researchers, journalists, human rights organisations, and anyone interested can examine the details of each incident, track its provenance, and understand how discriminatory laws are used to target LGBTQIA+ expression based on verified instances.
Project 6.21
The dataset we produced and described in the paper will be updated as we uncover new cases of persecution. We launched Project 6.21, through which we conduct ongoing monitoring of administrative cases under Articles 6.21 and 6.21.2 of the Russian Code of Administrative Offences, which target LGBTQIA+ expression. Fund our upcoming research and follow our social media to learn about the latest developments.
