A YEAR AFTER: MAIN VIOLATIONS OF HUMAN RIGHTS IN CRIMEA PART 4 On September 24, Elzara Islyamova, the ETR TV Channel Director General, received a letter from the Extremism Combating Center of the Russian Interior Ministry in the Republic of Crimea demanding to provide the certiR ed copies of the registration documents and approvals giving the right to perform activities, as well as the lease agreement for occupied premises, the channel’s staT schedule, the list of persons o7 cially employed by the channel, and employees’ job description. The document read that the inspection was carried out on the basis of a letter to the O7 ce of Roskomnadzor in the Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol indicating that the ATR channel had changed its content focus and ‘perseveres in the idea of possible repressions on ethnic and religious grounds, promotes the formation of anti-Russian opinions, deliberately enkindles distrust to the govern- ment among the Crimean Tatars, thus presenting an indirect threat of extremist activities’. However, in the beginning of 2015 the channel faced even greater problems. On January 26, the search with the involvement of a large number of armed represent- atives of Special Police Forces was conducted in the ATR o7 ce. Due to this, the work of ATR news service was disabled for a day. The grounds for the search was the allegation about the materials related to the criminal investigation of the death of two people during the events of February 26, 2014, near the ARC VR building. On November 2, 2015, the homes Elzara Islyamova, ATR ex-Director General and Lily Bujurova, ATR Deputy Director were searched. Moreover, Bujurova’s home was searched with gross violations of procedural norms. In particular, a lawyer was not allowed to be present; there were armed men in the house, which frightened the children. In December 2015, the home of ATR ex-Director General was searched again. The next day, the apartment of Roman Spiridonov, ex-Editor of ‘15 Minutes’ news agency, which was part of the ATR holding, was searched. During the search, the FSS o7 cer planted on top of the fridge a folder with instructions for the making an explosive device, which resulted in subpoenaing of Spiridonov for interrogation. The ATR TV channel made four attempts to obtain a Russian license, but failed to get a permit to broadcast in Crimea. Moreover, the “head” of Crimea Sergey Ak- syonov accused the TV channel’s leadership of deliberated delay of the obtaining of broadcasting license. According to him, the channel intentionally made mis- takes in the documents required for the obtaining of the license in order to over- blow a scandal. 103