Roskomnadzor, guided by the decision of Kuibyshev district court of Omsk on July 24, 2018, made in the register of banned sites and blocked access to four crypto-currency exchangers: Bestchange.ru, Fastobmen.net, Pushpayer.com and Xchange.cash.
In its ruling, the court refers to the Federal laws “On Central Bank of the Russian Federation” dated 10 July 2002 “On information, information technologies and protection of information” dated 27 July 2006 and on the informational letter of Rosfinmonitoring and the Central Bank from 2014.
Because of this, bitcoin is recognized a “money surrogate, which promotes the growth of the shadow economy and can not be used by citizens and legal entities on the territory of the Russian Federation”.
“Placing in the public domain in information and telecommunication Internet network of information on the “electronic currency” Bitcoin (bitcoin), which is a virtual means of payment and savings (a text sequence consisting of Latin letters and digits) is contrary to Federal law and is the information which distribution in the Russian Federation is prohibited”, — stated in the decree.
It is noteworthy that the trial occurred in the absence of the exchanger, and blocking occurred more than seven months since the judgement.
The head of public organization “Roskomsvoboda” Artem Kozlyuk commentary magazine ForkLog explained that the lack of legal regulation of the cryptocurrency sphere unleashes the district Prosecutor’s offices at the initiation of the locks.
“The employees of the local Prosecutor’s office it is necessary to perform statistical reporting on how they successfully compete with prohibited materials. Based on this paper are recorded in local courts, which on the machine decide on the locks without an invitation by the defendant and then all these solutions fall into ILV as a rule, after the expiration of time for appeal. Occasionally processing proceeds to block almost the next day, when things are resonant, as in the case of Telegram. But when it is cane-statistical reporting, ILV slowly, over several months, the thread puts them in the register of banned resources. Websites related to the cryptocurrency, not the only category of “prohibited information”, in which 7 years are initiated case. According to our statistics, the sector of locks on judgments is 23% of the total,” told Kozlyuk
Meanwhile, according to the official explanation of the Supreme court of the Russian Federation, cases of blocking websites are required to be considered in the presence of their owners or administrators.
“This clarification — ACE in the hole for site owners, and they can use it when applying to the higher courts with the requirement to return the case to the courts of first instance. In our view, to limit access to sites of cryptocurrency is not quite correct and we are using our legal service has repeatedly appealed against such blocking in the higher courts. Precedents of successful cases, when the owner of the site is in Russian court and achieve the unlock is, and they are not unique”, — said Artyom Kozlyuk.
We will remind, in may 2017, the Oktyabrsky district court of St. Petersburg decided to accept prohibited on the territory of Russia the information disseminated on the websites of the 40 different bitcoin exchangers.
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