VLADIMIR KHARITONOV v. RUSSIA JUDGMENT
such as LiveJournal, YouTube or Facebook. Access to his website had been
restricted for a short period of time not exceeding three months. He had not
shown that the owner of the offending website or the ISP had challenged the
blocking decision. The Russian courts had correctly established that the
measures taken by Roskomnadzor had sought to forestall circulation of
unlawful information and that the relevant provisions of the domestic law
had provided the applicant with a sufficient degree of protection against
arbitrary interference.
28. Lastly, the Government cited the provisions of the British, French,
German, Chinese and United States law relating to the suppression of child
pornography and concluded that all States, without exception, provided for
some form of filtering of Internet material. The Government also dismissed
the submissions by third-party interveners as irrelevant to the subject matter
of the present case.
(c) Third-party interveners
29. Access Now, a global civil-society organisation defending the digital
rights of users at risk, submitted that an assessment of proportionality of
restrictions on freedom of expression, including website blocking, should
include both substantive (what is blocked) and procedural (how it is
blocked) elements. The level of safeguards must be appropriate to the nature
of allegedly illegal content. Website blocking interferes with the core of the
right to freedom of expression, and affected individuals must be notified and
granted adequate remedies to challenge blocking measures.
30. ARTICLE 19, a global campaign for freedom of expression, and the
Electronic Frontier Foundation, a legal and policy organisation safeguarding
privacy in the digital world, emphasised that blocking access to entire
websites was an extreme and disproportionate measure. It was analogous to
banning a newspaper or television station, and was incapable of
distinguishing between lawful and unlawful content. Any order to block
access to content should be as narrowly targeted as possible and be the least
restrictive means to deal with the alleged unlawful activity. It must take into
consideration the overall effectiveness of the measure and the risks of
“over-blocking” other lawful content, including by reference to the
technologies available to comply with the order. The interveners cited
judgments from European high courts, which concurred that blocking
websites by IP address carried a greater risk of undesirable effects on third
parties and of “over-blocking” (they cited the Antwerp Court of Appeals
judgment of 26 September 2011 in VZW Belgian Anti-Piracy Federation
v. NV Telenet, 2010/AR/2541; two United Kingdom High Court judgments,
Dramatico Entertainment Limited & Ors v. British Sky Broadcasting
Ltd & Ors (No. 2) [2012] EWHC 1152 (Ch), and Cartier International AG
& Ors v. British Sky Broadcasting Ltd & Ors [2014] EWHC 3354 (Ch); and
the Federal Court of Justice judgment of 26 November 2015 in the
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