OOO FLAVUS AND OTHERS v. RUSSIA JUDGMENT showing their solidarity with the defendants cannot be treated as calls for unauthorised public events. Reiterating that expression on matters of public interest is entitled to strong protection, the Court finds that the interpretation adopted by the Prosecutor General had no basis in fact and was therefore arbitrary and manifestly unreasonable. 35. The Prosecutor General also claimed that www.kasparov.ru had reproduced an image of a pamphlet inciting Crimeans to commit “unlawful actions”. The pamphlet apparently called on Crimeans not to stay silent and not to surrender. The Prosecutor General’s decision did not specify the nature of the allegedly unlawful actions, the elements which rendered them unlawful or the authority that allowed a Russian prosecutor to determine which conduct by non-Russian nationals living outside the Russian jurisdiction should be considered unlawful. In any event, the generic term of “unlawful actions” did not fall within any of the three categories of prohibited content defined in section 15.3. It follows that the Prosecutor General’s decision regarding the content on www.kasparov.ru did not have a legal basis. (d) Legitimate aim and “necessary in a democratic society” 36. The Court has found above that, to the extent that the interference targeted the content which was considered illegal under section 15.3, it did not follow the procedure established in the domestic law and fell foul of the lawfulness requirement. In so far, however, as the Prosecutor General requested, and Roskomnadzor implemented, a blocking order against the applicants’ entire websites, the Court will continue its examination to establish whether the blocking of access to the entire websites pursued a legitimate aim and could be considered “necessary in a democratic society”. 37. The Court reiterates that the wholesale blocking of access to a website is an extreme measure which has been compared to banning a newspaper or television station (see paragraphs 15 and 16 above). Such a measure deliberately disregards the distinction between the legal and illegal information the website may contain, and renders inaccessible large amounts of content which has not been identified as illegal. Blocking access to the entire website has the practical effect of extending the scope of the blocking order far beyond the illegal content which had been originally targeted (compare Ahmet Yıldırım, cited above, § 63). 38. The Court has found above that the decision on the illegal nature of the websites’ content had been made in the present case on spurious grounds or outright arbitrarily. However, even if there were exceptional circumstances justifying the blocking of illegal content, a measure blocking access to an entire website has to be justified on its own, separately and distinctly from the justification underlying the initial order targeting illegal content, and by reference to the criteria established and applied by the Court under Article 10 of the Convention (see Ahmet Yıldırım, § 66, and Kablis, 13