In St. Petersburg, the court decided to block two communities of LGBT activists on VKontakte.

The Oktyabrsky District Court of St. Petersburg decided to limit access on Vkontakte to the Russian LGBT Network and Russian LGBT Community communities. MBKh Media writes about this with reference to the United Press Service of the Courts of St. Petersburg.

The press service described information in communities as “denying family values, promoting non-traditional sexual relationships and promoting disrespect for parents and other family members.” The judge considered that “the posting of drawings, photographs and videos depicting scenes of same-sex love between girls and boys is regarded as public propaganda of non-traditional sexual relationships.”

The blocking of communities was confirmed by Igor Kochetkov, executive director of the Russian LGBT Network. “One of these communities is really ours - vk.com/lgbtrussia. The second is not ours, it’s just a group of people, I know them, but I myself have nothing to do with this group... If there were complaints, I should have been informed about them, but this was not done. And we just now discovered with surprise and indignation that the group was blocked. We will definitely appeal this blocking - we will go to court,” MBKh Media quotes Kochetkov.

• On September 30, the Naberezhnye Chelny Magistrate’s Court fined the former administrator of a gay dating group 50 thousand rubles under the article on “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations among minors” (Article 6.21 of the Administrative Code). The man administered the group until 2010, then left it. However, formally he remained the owner of the group and could not relinquish these powers due to the peculiarities of VKontakte, and the content was posted by the group members themselves, for whom he was responsible.