A 21-year-old blogger, Chinese citizen, Haoyang Xu, who studied in Kazan, left Russia after a court decision to expel him under the law on “LGBT propaganda”. This was reported by the Kvir Svit project that helped him.
This morning, the bailiffs sent him by plane from Kazan to Moscow, and from there they put him on a plane from Russia.
Haoyang Xu and his 23-year-old boyfriend Gela Gogishvili, who blogged about their life together, were detained on April 5. The next day, the judge sentenced Haoyang to seven days of arrest and expulsion from the country for “dissemination among minors of information demonstrating non-traditional sexual relations” (part 4 of article 6.21.2 of the Code of Administrative Offenses).
The reason for this was 19 videos on the couple's YouTube channel. The policemen who drew up the report stated that “out of 64.9 thousand subscribers [of the channel], 1,791 people [were] minors.” A denunciation of the blog to the police, after which an administrative case was opened, was written by a church watchman from the Altai Territory at the end of February. Then the couple began to receive death threats. Bloggers said that their persecution was organized by St. Petersburg activist Timur Bulatov.
After serving his administrative arrest, student Haoyang Xu was placed in a temporary detention center for foreign citizens in Naberezhnye Chelny. He complained about the conditions. “No water, no food, nothing. Some kind of dirty water is given,” Gogishvili recounted his words. The city Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which is responsible for the work of the center, denied this.
“The video message that Haoyang recorded from the detention center went viral and reached the Chinese segment of social networks. This drew the attention of the Chinese police. They deleted the video and detained and interrogated Haoyang's friends who distributed it. They came to his family home in Sichuan, interrogated them and said that they would detain Haoyang himself as soon as he gets to China, ”said representatives of the LGBT Case.
Gogishvili himself, who was released on the day of detention on April 5, was subject to a protocol under the same article. As the LGBT Case project, which helped the couple, reported, the justice of the peace returned the materials to the police because of violations. He left Russia with the support of the Sphere Foundation.