The regional court approved the decision to block Tor

The Saratov Regional Court upheld the decision of the lower instance.

On December 15, 2022, the Saratov Regional Court announced that it had considered an appeal against the decision of the Leninsky District Court of Saratov to block the anonymous Tor browser and left it unchanged.

This decision was made on July 28, 2022. A court in Saratov declared the information contained in the Tor Browser application and the application hosted on Google Play banned for distribution in Russia. In addition, the court then separated into a separate proceeding the claim of the prosecutor's office against Google LLC to remove Tor Browser from the application store.

Initially, the Saratov court made a decision back in December 2017, it provided for a ban on the Tor Project website on the grounds that you can download the Tor browser there and use it to visit sites with extremist materials. In December 2021, Roskomnadzor demanded that The Tor Project Inc. remove prohibited information and began to restrict the browser. In January 2022, Roskomsvoboda lawyers filed in the interests of The Tor Project Inc. the appeal, which on May 19 the Saratov Regional Court satisfied and sent the case for a new trial. After that, in July, Roskomnadzor lifted the blocking.

Roskomsvoboda's arguments from the appeal, rejected by the Saratov Regional Court, were that under Chapter 27.1 of the CAS information, but not applications or technologies, could be prohibited . At the same time, the lawyers of Roskomsvoboda drew attention to the fact that anonymizers can be blocked out of court by decision of the Prosecutor General's Office, but only if they do not comply with the established procedure.

We consider unlawful court decisions to block means of anonymizing traffic on the Internet (mostly such decisions were made before 2017, when a separate mechanism for blocking VPNs and anonymizers was introduced). By themselves, such technical means do not contain any prohibited information, and access to prohibited materials can also be carried out through other tools, including through a conventional search engine, since it has not yet been possible to completely remove them from the global network. a similar logic adhered to The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in its judgment "Engels v. Russia". According to the Strasbourg Court, the idea of ​​banning information about technologies for accessing information is not fundamentally different from the idea of ​​banning printers and copiers on the grounds that they can be used to replicate extremist materials.

Sources

• The Tor Project appealed the blocking of an anonymous browser // Saratov Regional Court. 2022. December 15.