ON PROSECUTOR'S REQUEST, ACCESS TO SITE ON WHICH EXTREMIST MATERIALS ARE POSTED IS SHUT DOWN
Website of Kemerovo Prosecutor's Office, 13 May 2016
At the request of the prosecutor of the Central district of the city of Kemerovo, a court ruled that a program by means of which it was possible get access to a website that had previously been prohibited by a court is forbidden.
During monitoring of the Internet, the prosecutor's office discovered that on one of the websites a program had been posted which permitted someone to log onto the website of the religious society of Jehovah's Witnesses. In 2013, by decision of a court of the city of Tver, it was entered into the register of websites which contain material that is forbidden on the territory of Russia.
Because of this, the prosecutor sent to a court a petition requesting that distribution on Russian territory of a program that provides access to a forbidden website be ruled to be prohibited.
The court of the Central district of the city of Kemerovo granted completely the petition of the prosecutor. After the court's decision takes legal effect, the page with the URL address will be included in the registry of programs whose distribution in Russia is banned. (tr. by PDS, posted 16 May 2016)
KEMEROVO COURT REQUIRES BLOCKING ACCESS TO ANONYMIZER AIDING VISITS TO JEHOVAH'S WITNESSES' WEBSITE
jw-ru.blogspot.com, 13 May 2016
On 13 May 2016, the prosecutor's office of Kemerovo province reported that the Central district court of Kemerovo granted the petition of the district prosecutor's office for blocking a program posted on one of the websites by means of which it was possible to log on to the forbidden website of Jehovah's Witnesses.
Apparently, such a program is understood to be a kind of anonymizer [or, anonymous proxy] website. It should be noted that anonymizers in and of themselves do not contain any forbidden material. They merely provide access to various resources. Because of this, rights advocates consider the decision to block the anonymizer to be illegal. Access to so-called forbidden materials can be accomplished also by many other devices. It remains simply to find the necessary link through an ordinary search engine and to open it. Search engines such as Yandex [Russian] or Google [English] contain free access to a great number of links to so-called forbidden resources, since it has not be possible to remove them completely from the global network. However the provision of such a possibility is not a reason for closing the search engines.
Because of this, rights advocates consider the decision to block the anonymizer to be illegal, just as the prohibition of the Jehovah's Witnesses' website is illegal.
In its time, the district prosecutor's office in Murmansk requested that 13 anonymizers be blocked. The Anapsk city court in 2015 and 2016 adopted a decision to block an anonymizer and a number of other such services. But when some anonymizers are blocked, others appear. Therefore many questions arise about the legality and practicality of blocking such resources. (tr. by PDS, posted 16 May 2016)
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