Let prosecutors look for enemies

Bashkir kurultai is looking for ways to squeeze "Internet extremists"

On Friday, the State Duma considered in the first reading and rejected a bill on liability for the dissemination of extremist materials on the Internet. The developer of the bill, the kurultai of Bashkortostan, proposed to supplement ...

On Friday, the State Duma considered in the first reading and rejected a bill on liability for the dissemination of extremist materials on the Internet.

The drafter of the bill, the kurultai of Bashkortostan, proposed to supplement the existing Law "On countering extremist activity."

According to the Bashkir deputies, the law on extremism does not apply to information materials posted on the Internet. This is primarily due to the fact that sites hosting extremist materials are, as a rule, registered outside the Russian Federation, and it is technically impossible to identify the authors and owners of sites.

Nevertheless, the developers suggested that extremism in informational materials be searched by a federal court at the location of the site or the author of the extremist material.

The Duma Committee on Civil, Criminal, Arbitration and Procedural Legislation rejected the bill on formal grounds. He did not consider it necessary to single out extremist activity on the World Wide Web in a separate article and suggested that the authors specify the concepts of “site location” and “author location” of extremist material.

The developers objected: if it is impossible to establish the location of the site or the author, the case should be initiated at the place where extremist materials were found on the basis of a prosecutor's recommendation. This proposal remained without comment.

Andrey Nazarov, a deputy from United Russia, who had previously clashed with the government of Bashkiria, explained that the appearance of the bill was caused by the difficult situation in the republic. According to him, attempts have long been made in Bashkortostan to establish censorship over the independent press.

“The most painful, according to the Bashkir leadership, is the issue of sites that are not controlled and can convey to citizens everything they consider necessary,” he said.

Recall that in the summer in Bashkiria, editors and owners of websites were arrested, which, according to Nazarov, “supported the Russian-speaking population of the republic,” and recently the circulation of a newspaper that was objectionable to the government of the republic was confiscated there.