BULGAKOV v. RUSSIA JUDGMENT (b) The applicant 24. The applicant explained that the formula which had been used in the blocking decision in the present case – blocking access to the website’s IP address at the level of the ISP – harked back to the Supreme Court’s judgment of 10 May 2011 (see paragraph 12 above). From that time, the Russian courts had used the formula in a large number of cases to block access to the IP addresses of entire websites, even where the prohibited material was located on just one or two pages of the websites (see paragraph 13 above). That formula flouted the distinction between the website as a whole and a particular page of a website, in disregard of the definitions in section 2 of the Information Act. On textual reading, the courts ordered the blocking of access to particular webpages which contained extremist material. As the scope of the order was ostensibly limited to illicit content, they were not bound to consider whether it affected the accessibility of the website’s legitimate content. However, the court-mandated technical means of implementing a blocking order – blocking access to the website’s IP address – inevitably resulted in blocking access to the entire website, because only websites had IP addresses whereas their individual webpages did not. To the applicant’s knowledge, there had been only one instance in which the courts had correctly acknowledged that blocking access to one page by way of the website’s IP address would have the collateral effect of blocking the whole website (see paragraph 14 above). Incidentally, that judgment had been upheld by the same Rostov Regional Court which, two months later, had reached the opposite conclusion in the applicant’s case. The applicant concluded that the judicial practice, which had developed following the Supreme Court’s decision and of which his case was but one example, failed to meet the “quality of law” requirement. It disregarded the distinction between a “website” and a “webpage” and allowed courts to block access to an entire website on the grounds that one of its pages contained problematic content. It also removed the need for considering how that form of blocking affected legitimate content. For the applicant, that manner of proceedings was tantamount to holding that “access to hearing room 5 should be restricted by blocking the main entrance to the courthouse”. (c) Third-party interveners 25. The UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, an independent expert mandated by the Human Rights Council to report on the extent, nature and severity of restrictions and violations of freedom of expression, submitted that individuals should be allowed to enjoy freedom of expression in online space to the same extent that they enjoyed it offline. States frequently adopted anti-extremism laws that were so broad as to give authorities excessive discretion to restrict online expression, contrary to the lawfulness requirement. Such legislation prioritised restrictions on, rather than protection of, free expression as the primary State responsibility and failed to define precisely limitations on online expression and justifications for those limitations. The wholesale blocking of websites rarely, if ever, satisfied the criteria for permissible limitations on freedom of expression, taking into account that permissible restrictions should be content-specific and should not target websites solely because they were critical of the government or political system. 7