GLUKHIN v. RUSSIA JUDGMENT IV. OTHER RELEVANT MATERIAL 40. The relevant parts of the report of 17 January 2022 by OVD-Info, an independent human rights media project, entitled “How the Russian state uses cameras against protesters” read as follows: “Detentions of protesters after the end of the event, or, as we call them, ‘post factum detentions’, have taken place before 2021. In 2018, OVD-Info counted 219 such cases in 39 regions of Russia; they were mostly isolated in nature: one or two people were detained in connection with one event, in exceptional cases the number of detainees reached ten. They began to be widely used in 2020 ... We believe that the increase in the number of post factum detentions is based on the development of technologies for monitoring social networks and facial recognition ... Our report is devoted to the use of facial recognition systems to restrict freedom of assembly. Although our research focuses on Moscow, according to our data, the geography of this phenomenon goes far beyond the capital ... The use of facial recognition technology is evidenced, first of all, by the large-scale post factum detentions and the prosecution of non-public figures, as well as the words of police officers ... Although the use of a facial recognition system to identify protesters was widely covered in the media after the January 2021 protests, the technology is rarely mentioned in official documents ... The paucity of direct evidence of the use of facial recognition technology in police reports, case files and court rulings may indicate that the police and courts prefer not to officially document this information. Nevertheless, in some documents there are indirect signs of the use of technology ... People whom the police suspected of participating in the protest events were detained right at the workplace, removed from university classes, one person was taken right from a lesson at school. There were cases of detentions in cafes, on the street, in the subway, on the train platform and on the train ... Detentions on platforms, in cafes and in rented apartments may indicate the use of movement tracking systems around the city against the persecuted participants of the protests. Records from an CCTV at residential entrances can be used for this search ... If a report on an offense against a person was issued post factum, and not after a person being detained at an event, this often means that their identity was not established on the spot ... Therefore, law enforcement officers need to explain the process behind a comparison of identity between the person captured on the video and the person they are trying to hold liable because of participation in an unauthorised event. Having studied the available materials, OVD-Info has come to the conclusion that there are two main ways for the police to do this: 1. an indication that the ‘operational-search activities’; identification of persons occurred during 2. a police officer’s report in which they state that they ‘identified’ a specific citizen on photos and videos, without further explanation. 15