OOO FLAVUS AND OTHERS v. RUSSIA JUDGMENT
4. The applicants are owners of online media outlets. The first applicant,
OOO Flavus, owns grani.ru, a news and opinion website that has existed
since 2000 and has been registered as an electronic periodical since 2003.
The second applicant, Mr Kasparov, is the founder of www.kasparov.ru, an
independent web publication on social and political subjects and also a
platform for independent bloggers. The third applicant, OOO Mediafokus,
owns the online Daily Newspaper (“Ezhednevnyy Zhurnal”) at ej.ru, which
since 2004 has been publishing research and analysis by political scientists,
economists and journalists, many of whom have been critical of the Russian
Government.
5. In December 2013, the Information Act was amended to empower the
Prosecutor General to identify websites containing calls for mass disorder,
extremist activities, or participation in unauthorised mass gatherings (see
section 15.3 in paragraph 12 below). A court order was not required; the
Prosecutor General could submit a blocking request directly to the telecoms
regulator, Roskomnadzor, which in turn would notify the website’s web
hosting service provider. The provider would then immediately block access
to the webpage and notify its owner within twenty-four hours.
6. On 13 March 2014 the Prosecutor General sent Roskomnadzor a
request to block the applicants’ online media websites. The request was
worded as follows:
“An examination of the information published on the pages of the said websites
revealed a uniform thematic trend towards the coverage of public events of an
unlawful nature in Russian territory.
In particular, the Ezhednevniy Zhurnal website (www.ej.ru) includes a subsection on
the ‘Bolotnaya case’1 which posts and accumulates articles and publications about the
protests held in the Russian territory in support of defendants in the criminal
proceedings relating to the mass disorder in the Bolotnaya Square in Moscow
[on 6] May 2012. It follows from the contents of the publications ... that illegal
protests ... are an acceptable and necessary form of expression of one’s civic position
and [such publications] are essentially a call for participation in such events.
Furthermore, an article entitled ‘Participants in a gathering in support of the
Bolotnaya victims arrested [in the centre of Moscow]’ was found on the www.grani.ru
website. The article describes the arrest of participants of an unauthorised public event
‘Strategy 6’, which involves public performances by a group of individuals on the
sixth day of every month in support of the defendants in the criminal case concerning
mass disorder in Moscow on 6 May 2012. Unlawful actions by the event participants
are represented as being acceptable, with a view to attracting attention to the criminal
case and calling for participation in similar actions.
The www.kasparov.ru website features an article entitled ‘Property of the
[Ukrainian] State to be nationalised in the Crimea’2, which shows a pamphlet with an
image of an armed man, the title ‘Red Guerrilla Fighters’ and the text ‘Wake up,
For detailed information on the Bolotnaya case, see Frumkin v Russia, no 74568/12,
§§ 7-65, ECHR 2016 (extracts).
2 The “Crimean secession referendum” was scheduled to be held on 16 March 2014.
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