Communicated on 10 January 2020

Published on 27 January 2020

THIRD SECTION

Application no. 55496/19 OOO MEDIAFOKUS against Russia lodged on 11 October 2019

SUBJECT MATTER OF THE CASE

The application is a follow-up case of application no. 19074/16 which concerned the Russian authorities ’ decision to block access to the website of the online magazine ej.ru. The instant case concerns the decision to block access to a successor magazine, ej2015.ru, on the basis of the original blocking decision.

QUESTIONS TO THE PARTIES

Was there a violation of Article 10 of the Convention on account of the decision to block access to the ej2015.ru website? In particular,

(a) Did the blocking decision have a foreseeable and precise legal basis? What is the legal definition of a “mirror website” and what are the criteria and procedure for determining that one website is a “mirror” of another?

(b) Did the domestic courts give relevant and sufficient reasons for upholding the blocking decision? Did they identify the specific offending information or webpages?

(c) Was the blocking decision “necessary in a democratic society”? Was it necessary to block access to the entire website rather than to specific offending webpages? Was there an assessment of the impact of the blocking decision on webpages that did not contain any offending information?