28
KABLIS v. RUSSIA JUDGMENT
93. In this connection the Court takes note of the applicant’s argument
that the term “public events held in breach of the established procedure” in
section 15.3 of the Information Act is too broad and vague. Indeed, in the
absence of any authoritative interpretation of that term by the Supreme or
Constitutional Courts, and taking into account that the Government have not
submitted any examples of its restrictive interpretation and application in
administrative and judicial practice, it appears that any breach of the
procedure for the conduct of public events, no matter how small or
innocuous, may serve as a ground for the Prosecutor General’s decision to
block access to Internet posts containing calls to participate in that event.
Access to such posts can therefore be blocked by a prosecutor, as in the
present case, for the sole reason that it calls for participation in a public
event at a location that has not been approved by the authorities, without
having to establish a risk of disorder or of any real nuisance to the rights of
others.
94. The Court further notes that the Prosecutor General and his deputies
may order the blocking of an entire website or webpage – for example an
entire social networking account, as in the present case – on the grounds that
it contains some illegal material. Section 15.3 of the Information Act does
not require them to examine whether the wholesale blocking of the entire
website or webpage, rather than of a specific information item published on
it, is necessary, having regard to the criteria established and applied by the
Court under Article 10 of the Convention. Such an obligation, however,
flows directly from the Convention and from the case-law of the
Convention institutions. In particular, Article 10 requires the authorities to
take into consideration, among other aspects, the fact that such a measure,
by rendering large quantities of information inaccessible, is bound to
substantially restrict the rights of Internet users and to have a significant
collateral effect on the material that has not been found to be illegal (see
Ahmet Yıldırım, cited above, § 66, and Cengiz and Others v. Turkey,
nos. 48226/10 and 14027/11, § 64, ECHR 2015 (extracts)). There is no
evidence in the domestic decisions in the present case that those factors
were taken into consideration when the applicant’s entire VKontakte
account was blocked on the grounds that it contained one illegal information
item.
95. It follows that the applicable legal framework affords the Prosecutor
General and his deputies very wide powers to apply prior restraint measures
to Internet posts containing calls to participate in public events, both as
regards the grounds for ordering the blocking measure and as regards its
scope.
96. The Court notes that the exercise of the Prosecutor General’s powers
to block Internet posts containing calls to participate in public events is
subject to judicial review. However, the breadth of the executive’s
discretion is such that it is likely to be difficult, if not impossible, to