The Human Rights Committee complained about the blocking of platform X in Russia
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Journalist Evgeny Feldman (currently lives in Latvia) and opposition politicians Ilya Yashin (included by the Ministry of Justice in the register of foreign agents, serving a sentence for disseminating deliberately false information about the armed forces of the Russian Federation), Evgeny Domozhirov (ex-coordinator of Navalny’s Vologda headquarters, liquidated and banned in the Russian Federation, currently wanted) and former Moscow municipal deputy Vadim Korovin sent a complaint to the UN Human Rights Committee (HRC) about the actions of the Russian authorities: these actions, in their opinion, led to the slowdown and blocking of Twitter and limited the right of citizens to freedom of expression. The head of the State Duma Committee on Information Policy, Alexander Khinshtein, considers the applicants’ position to be illegal: the blocking occurred in accordance with Russian legislation due to the failure to remove prohibited materials.
Evgeny Feldman, Ilya Yashin, Evgeny Domozhirov and Vadim Korovin complained to the UNHRC about problems with Twitter (now known as X) in the Russian Federation. Roskomnadzor for the first time forcibly slowed down the service in March 2021: the service did not remove 3,168 materials containing calls for suicide of minors, child pornography and information about drugs. Access was completely blocked on March 4, 2022 at the request of the Prosecutor General’s Office.
The authors of the complaint note that limiting the speed of access to the Twitter service was implemented using DPI (Deep Packet Inspection) technology. For this purpose, technical means of countering threats were used – equipment installed in the networks of operators and providers within the framework of the law on the “sovereign RuNet”. It should be noted that Facebook (owned by Meta, which is recognized as extremist and banned in the Russian Federation) was subject to a similar slowdown at the end of February 2022 by decision of the Prosecutor General’s Office.
Roskomnadzor then explained that the partial restriction of access was due to censorship of Russian media on the platform.
Now the applicants have reported to the UN that they have repeatedly tried to appeal the actions of Roskomnadzor, but have not succeeded in removing Twitter from the list of “threats to the stability, security and integrity of the functioning of the Internet” neither in the Tagansky District Court, nor in the Moscow City Court, nor in the Second Cassation Court. Meanwhile, the actions of the authorities, according to the applicants, resulted in “the inability to publish the authors’ own views, that is, to effectively exercise the right to freedom of expression” guaranteed by Art. 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights of the United Nations.
The lawyer representing the applicants, Stanislav Seleznev, recalls that Russians have already appealed to the ECHR with complaints about restrictions on the Internet and even won several cases in 2020. In this regard, the ECHR formulated standards common to the Council of Europe, providing for the inadmissibility of arbitrary interference in the dissemination of information. However, since March 2022, this jurisdiction does not extend to the Russian Federation, and the applicants count on the development of similar standards for UN member countries. The decisions of the Human Rights Committee are binding on UN member states, notes Mr. Seleznev.
Kommersant sent a request to Roskomnadzor, but was unable to obtain an immediate comment.
“The slowdown of Twitter from the point of view of international practice is a partial shutdown. The UN has already spoken out about this (for example, when examining situations with website blocking in India.— “Kommersant”), condemning “shutdowns,” both full and partial,” says Sarkis Darbinyan, head of the legal practice of the Roskomsvoboda project (included in the register of foreign agents).
“Twitter was blocked in strict accordance with Russian legislation due to the failure to remove a large number of prohibited materials (pornography, drugs, etc.),” emphasized Alexander Khinshtein, head of the State Duma Committee on Information Policy, in a conversation with Kommersant. In this regard, the parliamentarian called the applicants’ position “illegal and politically motivated.”
Industry representatives believe that Twitter’s position as one of the leading information platforms in the Russian Federation was not undermined by a forced slowdown. “In the last three or four years, Telegram in Russia has taken over from Twitter its once sought-after role as a media platform,” says Vasily Cherny, director of strategic communications at Brand Analytics. According to him, after the blocking, only the nuclear part of his Russian-speaking audience continues to log into Twitter, “old users who have become accustomed to relying on it for the last ten years.”
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