Access to a number of MDK public publications is prohibited

In St. Petersburg, the court recognized the publications of the public MDK "VKontakte" as information prohibited for distribution in Russia.

On October 27, 2015, the Smolninsky District Court of St. Petersburg satisfied the claim of the Prosecutor's Office of the Tsentralny District of St. Petersburg and recognized the information posted in the MDK community on the VKontakte social network as prohibited for distribution on the territory of the Russian Federation and restricted access to it.

The court agreed with the prosecutor's office that the community provided information " having signs of humiliation (insult) of various groups of people on the basis of religious and national affiliation, public desecration of religious and liturgical literature, objects of religious veneration, signs and emblems of worldview symbols and paraphernalia." It is also said that the community page contains "informational materials that are harmful to the mental health of children, adolescents, and youth ".

These signs were discovered by the authors of an examination conducted at the Herzen University: they mean the images of Jesus Christ posted in public after Easter.

Public MDK is a very popular community with an audience of several million users, filled with a variety of humorous pictures (often obscene) and replicas (often obscene) of a completely base nature. We did not have the opportunity to familiarize ourselves with the publications that caused the claims, and we assume that they contained signs of incitement to hatred.

However, we doubt the validity of the court's decision. Public desecration of religious and liturgical literature, objects of religious veneration, signs and emblems of ideological symbols and paraphernalia is the content of Art. 5.26 of the Code of Administrative Offenses (violation of legislation on freedom of conscience, freedom of religion and religious associations) and, as it seems, is aimed at protecting religious objects from various forms of symbolic, but still physical impact; it is hardly applicable to images of these objects.

In addition, we believe that law enforcement agencies should have first contacted the community administrators and asked them to remove posts that they consider dangerous.

Sources

• The court recognized the content of the MDK VKontakte group as prohibited in the Russian Federation // Fontanka.ru. 2015. October 27.