How often have you wanted to walk farther down a riverbank to swim at a secluded beach or catch some pike, only to run into huge fences?
These baffling fences are usually extensions of the fences around some cottage development or private residence. How can that be, you ask, when under the law (Articles 6 and 8 of the Water Code) riverbanks and bodies of water—rivers, ponds, lakes, and reservoirs—must be open to all citizens? In other words, within 20 meters (about 66 feet) of the shore, no one has the right to stop people from accessing the water (for small streams and canals, the limit is 5 meters / about 16 feet).
Obviously, the people putting up fences and blocking off riverbanks are well connected and sit in big offices. And they’re not stupid: they pick the very best spots for swimming and pike fishing, then keep everyone else out.
It’s unfair, it’s illegal, and it’s corruption. So today I want to tell you about our new project, run by ACF’s lawyers.
They’ve been working on it for several months already, but today we’re ready to announce “Access to Water” as a permanent project, because we’ve already built up both practical experience and success stories.
In June, we wrote about a case in Novosibirsk. There, ACF filed a complaint with Rosprirodnadzor (Russia’s federal environmental watchdog) against a company owned by two United Russia deputies, Kalichenko and Sidorenko. They had put up a fence along the shore and, under the guise of a “cultural and wellness complex,” created a cottage settlement for themselves with a private closed beach, while people who wanted to fish or swim had to walk around kilometers of fencing and look for other places to relax.
After our intervention, the fence was removed, and the deputies’ company was fined 200,000 rubles (roughly a few thousand U.S. dollars, depending on the exchange rate). The prosecutor’s office is now considering whether to strip Deputy Kalichenko of his mandate for failing to declare his use of the land plot.
After the publication, many local residents wrote to thank us, because the problem had existed for years. And right away they told us about another fence a little farther upstream on the Ob River:
“And right nearby there’s the fence of the so-called ‘Obkom dachas’ (summer houses once tied to the regional Communist Party committee), and it also extends into the water... Thank you so much!”;
“The territory of the so-called ‘Obkom dachas.’ Land plot: 54:35:031810:7, just south of the one described in the article. These state dachas are used by officials from the Siberian Federal District and Novosibirsk Region. The fence used to run exactly along the boundary of the plot, but about five years ago extensions were pushed out into the water, while the old fence parallel to the shore was kept in place...”.
We also took up the case of the “Obkom dachas”—a place dating back to Soviet times and well known to everyone in Novosibirsk. For officials there, they built four 2–3-story residential buildings, two hotel complexes for hosting official delegations, three restaurants, and six saunas—all of it on the bank of the Ob.
And so that ordinary people wouldn’t see officials at leisure, they fenced off the whole area, including the riverbank itself—going, of course, beyond the boundaries of the plot—and another 30 meters (about 98 feet) into the water.
Following our complaint, the Siberian Federal District department of Rosprirodnadzor confirmed that the fence does indeed exist and that it, like all such fence-building projects, is illegal:
After a post on the ACF website, Governor Gorodetsky reported to local media the very next day that the illegal fence had been removed and that the riverbank was now open for public access:
The project is coordinated at our foundation by lawyer Vyacheslav Gimadi. He is from Novosibirsk himself, which is why he launched several pilot cases there, but we’ve also had successful cases in the Moscow Region. We’ll write about those later.
Russia’s rivers stretch for 8 million kilometers (about 5 million miles), and many of the most beautiful places near major cities have been illegally occupied and fenced off. So we have a lot of work ahead of us.
We ourselves are very fond of this project. It’s not a matter of “small deeds”; it’s a matter of principle. It concerns equality before the law, freedom of movement, and the right to rest and recreation. And, as I’ve said, the issue of any seized riverbank almost always leads back to corruption—and often to illicit enrichment as well.
If you have a specific case of an illegally seized riverbank and would like to work with us, write to us here: voda@fbk.info
Support us, and we’ll keep doing good work in this area for society as a whole.