The court for the first time demanded to block access to sites recognized as extremist

On May 23, 2007, by decision of the court of the Sovetsky District of Novosibirsk, access to four Internet resources, the materials of which were recognized as extremist, was limited. We are talking about Islamist and separatist sites - “Kavkaz-Center”, “ChechenPress”, “Daimokhk” and “Alan (Karachay-Balkarian) Information and Analytical Agency”, the materials of which, as noted by the Prosecutor’s Office of the Sovetsky District in a letter sent on March 13, 2007. submitted to the court, contained “war propaganda, incitement to national, racial or religious hatred and enmity.”

“In accordance with the philological and linguistic conclusion, the texts of the sites indicate a negative perception of everything Russian, are aimed at creating a negative image of the Russian people, attribute exclusively hostile actions to the Russians, imperial ambitions in relation to other peoples, and contain a distorted idea of ​​the role of the Russian people in the historical process.” , - says the message of the Novosibirsk Regional Prosecutor's Office.

The court satisfied the claim of the prosecutor's office of the Sovetsky district and made a decision obliging one of the Internet providers of the Sovetsky district, First Mile LLC, to block access to the specified resources. The court plans to consider similar claims against three more district providers (Akademtelecom CJSC, Polimex Plus LLC and SibelTelecom CJSC) on June 18, July 3 and July 16, 2007.

All sites are located outside of Russia, so law enforcement agencies are not able to close them without using international legal mechanisms.

According to Assistant Prosecutor of the Sovetsky District Elena Goncharova, the inspection was carried out jointly with specialists from the regional FSB department.

LLC "First Mile" is going to protest the decision of the prosecutor's office in court as contrary to the law on communications. This was announced at a press conference of Novosibirsk Internet providers on June 15, 20007.

Comm. This court decision is the first decision of this kind known to us in Russian law enforcement practice.

The scheme itself, chosen in Novosibirsk, although very cumbersome, is effective and is due to the absence of any generally accepted legal mechanisms for restricting access to information hosted on foreign servers.

The Law “On Combating Extremist Activities” contains the wording that extremist activity, in particular, is “assistance in its implementation or the commission of specified actions, including by providing for the implementation of specified activities ... telephone, fax and other types of communications, information services. .." . However, it is hardly possible to interpret in this way the activities of an Internet provider, which is responsible not for the content of sites, but only for access to the Internet (which contains a wide variety of resources, including truly extremist ones). It is also not at all obvious that a court decision declaring a site extremist automatically obliges all Internet providers to block access to it: after all, the law prohibits the distribution of extremist materials, but the Internet provider does not carry out any distribution (no more than, for example, a telephone company). Thus, successive court rulings in relation to each local Internet provider under the jurisdiction of a given court can be considered as court decisions to ensure the implementation of the main court decision (on recognizing site materials as extremist).

However, the very idea of ​​limiting access to specific Internet resources, in fact, by domain name, seems to us quite dubious. After all, nothing prevents the creation of new “mirrors” of this resource under other domain names, which will lead to another protracted series of lawsuits. It would be much more effective to prosecute the owners and authors of resources whose materials are recognized as extremist, using international legal mechanisms. Unless, of course, the court of the country in which the site’s editors or its hosting provider is located agrees that the site’s content deserves sanctions.

Information provided by the prosecutor's office of the Sovetsky district of Novosibirsk.

Sources

• The Novosibirsk court closed four extremist websites // FederalPress. 2007. May 29.
• At the request of the prosecutor of the Sovetsky district of Novosibirsk, the court restricted access to information with extremist content // Prosecutor's Office of the Novosibirsk Region. 2007. May 29.
• “The Novosibirsk prosecutor’s office will check city Internet providers”: a review of Novosibirsk media // Regnum news agency. 2007. June 1.