ENGELS v. RUSSIA JUDGMENT online privacy issues, copyright and digital communications. Its name is an abbreviation for “Russian Committee for Freedom”, an allusion to the name of the Russian telecoms regulator Roskomnadzor (“Russian Committee for Oversight”), which maintains a list of proscribed online content. 5. One page of the RosKomSvoboda website (rublacklist.net/bypass) provided a list and a short description of tools and software for bypassing restrictions on private communications and content filters on the Internet, such as virtual private networks (VPN), the Tor browser, the “invisible Internet” (I2P) technology, the “turbo” mode in web browsers, and the use of online translation engines for accessing content. 6. In 2015, a district prosecutor in the Krasnodar Region lodged a publicinterest claim with the Anapa Town Court, seeking a decision that information on the rublacklist.net/bypass page should be prohibited from dissemination in Russia. The prosecutor submitted that the anonymising tools available from that page enabled users to access extremist material on another, unrelated website. On 13 April 2015 the Anapa Town Court, without informing the applicant about the proceedings, granted the prosecutor’s application. It noted that the information on the rublacklist.net/bypass page had been made freely available without a password or registration to any user who wished to read or copy it. The Town Court declared illegal the content of the rublacklist.net/bypass page and ordered Roskomnadzor to enforce the decision immediately by blocking access to the applicant’s website. 7. Roskomnadzor asked the applicant to take down the webpage rublacklist.net/bypass, otherwise the website would be blocked. The applicant complied with the request and deleted the offending information. 8. Counsel for the applicant lodged an appeal. He pointed out that the applicant’s full contact details were listed on the website and that the examination of the prosecutor’s claim in his absence had breached the principle of fairness. He also submitted that providing information about tools and software for the protection of the privacy of browsing was not contrary to any Russian law. 9. On 29 September 2015 the Krasnodar Regional Court rejected the appeal in a summary fashion, without addressing the applicant’s arguments. RELEVANT DOMESTIC LEGAL FRAMEWORK 10. Section 3 of the Information Act (Federal Law no. 149-FZ of 27 July 2006) establishes legal principles governing access to information and information technologies. Principle 1 guarantees the freedom to search for, receive, impart, create and disseminate information by all legal means. Principle 2 requires that any restriction on access to information be set out in a federal law. Principle 8 prohibits legal regulations from favouring the use of particular information technologies. 11. Section 15.1 gives the telecoms regulator, Roskomnadzor, the authority to maintain the Integrated Register of domain names, webpage references (URL) and network addresses of websites featuring content which is banned in the Russian Federation. Subsection (5) provides for three grounds on which content may be deemed illegal and added to the Integrated Register: first, where the competent executive body has decided that the material falls under any of seven categories of illegal content, such as child pornography, the manufacture or use of narcotics, or methods of suicide; secondly, where a “judicial decision ... identified particular 2