Translated material
The ECHR will check the illegal filtering of Internet traffic in Moscow
In Strasbourg, a complaint of Roskomvoboda will be considered about the unreasonable blocking of our site in educational institutions of the capital of the Russian Federation.
An interesting precedent can be the next case of Roskomvoboda, associated with an unreasonable restriction of access to our Internet resources. So far, Strasbourg was considering our complaint about the illegal blocking of instructions on instruments for protecting private communications and restoring access to information on the network, the Russian Internet action gave the public organization another reason to complain to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).
In 2016, Roskomvobod became aware that a certain bot included her site in the content of the content filtration that is used in the provision of communication services in the educational and cultural state institutions of Moscow. As a result, Roskomsvoboda became inaccessible to students and visitors to capital schools, colleges, universities and other organizations under the jurisdiction of the Moscow Education Department (we learned from our users on blocking).
As the reason for the “local” blocking, the MGTS telecom operator, which serves the metropolitan department of education and its institution, first indicated the presence of extremist materials on the website, then information that harms the children. Since there was neither one nor the other on the site, Roskomasvobod tried to protect her right to freely disseminate information in the Russian court.
During the trial, it turned out that the bottrator was working on the basis of the state contract, which was concluded by the Department of Information Technology of Moscow with the MGTS communications operator in order to serve the institutions of the Moscow Department. Private companies of Safe Internet LLC and STEP LODZHIK LLC also participated in the content of the state contract. However, in order not to understand, whose boat was, who tuned it and whether his work complies with the Federal Law of December 29, 2010 No. 436-ФЗ “On the Protection of Children from Information that causes their health and development”, the court came to the conclusion that local content-filtration (whatever it may be), does not violate the rights of the Roskomvoboda.
Since the courts of appeal and cassation instances agreed with this conclusion and left the decision of the Basmanny District Court of Moscow in force, the lawyers of Roskomvoboda sent a complaint to the ECHR. In September 2018, confirmation came from Strasbourg that the complaint was registered and the issue of its transfer for consideration on the merits will be resolved.
Roskomvoboda believes that the metropolitan authorities and their counterparties clearly went beyond the legitimate limits of the content filtrations established by No. 436-ФЗ “On the Protection of Children from Information causing their health and development”, and unreasonably sanctioned the blocking of the site of a public organization on a network of educational institutions of Moscow. At the same time, the Russian courts did not even try to establish what materials of Roskomvoboda metropolitan officials considered harmful to Moscow schoolchildren, students and employees of educational institutions, and compare them with the requirements of the law. In a complaint to the ECHR, Roskomvoboda lawyers also appeal to violation of the principles of network neutrality , which do not allow filtering Internet traffic not based on the law.
Lawyer of Roskomvoboda
Ekaterina Abashina.
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