Novaya Gazeta’s magazine is also being taken away – Picture of the Day – Kommersant

The Basmanny District Court of Moscow, at the request of Roskomnadzor, annulled the media license of Novaya rasskazh-gazeta. This is a magazine supplement to Novaya Gazeta, which was registered back in 2009, but only started publishing this summer, after the newspaper was forced to stop working. Roskomnadzor’s claims were precisely that the journal did not release new publications for a long time. On the eve of the court, at the request of the same Roskomnadzor, canceled the license of Novaya Gazeta itself. Its editor-in-chief Dmitry Muratov, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, said the situation “has nothing to do with law, because apparently we no longer live in this field.”

On July 27, Roskomnadzor filed a lawsuit demanding to invalidate the registration of Novaya Rasskazh-gazeta with the Basmanny District Court of Moscow. This is a magazine supplement to Novaya Gazeta, which was registered in March 2009. In court, representatives of Roskomnadzor substantiated the claims by the fact that the magazine did not issue new publications for a “long time”, reports TASS. In turn, the defendant’s representatives asked to dismiss the claim as having no legal grounds. The judge of the Basmanny District Court of Moscow, Olga Lipkina, sided with Roskomnadzor and invalidated the license of the New Story-Gazeta.

Novaya rasskaz-gazeta lost its license the day after its parent publication. On the eve of the Basmanny District Court of Moscow deprived “Novaya Gazeta” a certificate of registration of a print media outlet – for failure to submit the editorial charter within the “set time limit”. The publication explained: Roskomnadzor considered that the publication should resend the package of documents after the change of founders in 2006. The publication’s lawyers reminded the court that the procedure does not involve providing copies of the charter to the authorities. Moreover, the requirement for the media to provide such a copy to government agencies appeared in the laws only in 2018, Nadezhda Prusenkova, head of the Novaya Gazeta press service, emphasized.

Note that the newspaper suspended work in March 2022. After a series of reports by journalist Elena Kostyuchenko about what is happening on the territory of Ukraine, the publication immediately received two warnings from Roskomnadzor about the absence of “foreign agency” markings. The team launched two new projects: Novaya Gazeta Evropa and Novaya rasskaz-gazeta. Both sites were blocked by Roskomnadzor at the request of the Prosecutor General’s Office. Information about the blocking of the website of Novaya rasskazh-gazeta appeared on July 24, and on July 27, Roskomnadzor filed a lawsuit demanding that it be deprived of its print media license.

“Only Evgeny Vadimovich Roizman (ex-mayor of Yekaterinburg, known for swearing in social networks.— “b”). But it is not possible to cite his comment,” Dmitry Muratov told Kommersant.

The editor-in-chief of the publication found it difficult to retell the meaning of Roskomnadzor’s claims to Novaya Rasskazh-gazeta: “In fact, we are not charged with anything, but they simply say that the general tone of the articles implies something. All this has absolutely nothing to do with law, because, apparently, we no longer live in this field.

Earlier, the editors of Novaya Gazeta called the decision of the Basmanny Court an “attempted murder” of the publication and “deprivation of the right to receive information” by readers. “Our colleagues who have already been killed by this state for the performance of their professional duty have been re-killed,” the statement said, listing the names of six newspaper employees who died during the years of its work. On September 15, a meeting is scheduled in the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, where Roskomnadzor will seek to cancel the registration of the Novaya Gazeta website as an electronic media. Only after that, Mr. Muratov explained to Kommersant, will the team announce how it will work.

Alexander Voronov