The court upheld the ban on the Tor browser

The Saratov Regional Court approved the decision to block the Tor browser on Google Play and The Tor Project website. This is reported by the Roskomsvoboda project, whose lawyer Ekaterina Abashina represents the interests of The TorProject in court.

The Leninsky District Court of Saratov banned the browser in July at the suit of the prosecutor's office. Among the reasons for the ban, it was indicated that Tor allows access to materials blocked in the Russian Federation.

Abashina noted that the case was considered with violations: during the proceedings in the court of first instance, Google LLC was excluded from the process, but it made a decision on its rights and obligations. “There were unconditional grounds for overturning [the decision of the court of first instance],” she said.

In 2017, the Saratov District Court recognized the link to download the Tor browser as “forbidden information,” according to which Roskomnadzor blocked the project’s page at the end of 2021. In May 2022, the Saratov Regional Court overturned this decision and sent the case back for a new trial.

• On February 24 , Roskomnadzor demanded that the media write about the war in Ukraine only with reference to official Russian sources. Also, journalists were forbidden to call the “Russian special operation” an attack, an invasion, or a declaration of war. Otherwise, the supervisory agency threatened with blocking and fines of up to five million rubles.
• As according to of August 23, Roskomnadzor has already blocked more than 7,000 websites, Roskomsvoboda. In early August, in an interview with Kommersant, Prosecutor General Igor Krasnov said that since February 24, at the request of prosecutors, about 138,000 Internet resources have been blocked in Russia. “After the start of the ‘special military operation’, we stepped up countering the spread of calls for extremism and terrorism, riots and ‘fake’ news on the Internet,” he said.