Court Overturns Decision to Block OVD-Info Website

The Moscow Regional Court has overturned the decision of the Lukhovitsy District Court to block the OVD-Info website, according to a report by Mediazona. The original blocking order was issued by the Lukhovitsy District Court, but the case has now been sent back for a new review. However, the address ovdinfo.org remains inaccessible—the project team needs to obtain documents from the court and submit them to Roskomnadzor.

“The ovdinfo.org website was blocked at the request of the prosecutor’s office last December, allegedly because OVD-Info’s activities were aimed at promoting terrorism and extremism in Russia. The court’s decision did not clarify which specific materials led to the block, but blocking the entire website and social media accounts over individual materials is illegal,” the project itself notes.

OVD-Info is represented by attorney Anastasia Samorukova. Here’s what she said about the situation:

“Initially, Grigory Okhotin was effectively denied access to justice. The goal of the Lukhovitsy court and prosecutor’s office was to prevent us from seeing anything, including the case materials. They went a bit too far—at first, we were even denied the opportunity to file an appeal. We challenged this refusal, the regional court reviewed our complaint, and today, finally, we were given access to the case materials. On a positive note: the judge who issued the refusal to appeal was actually reprimanded for denying Grigory Okhotin access to justice, since all this time we had no opportunity to review the case materials or file a complaint. A reprimand for a judge is quite rare. You really have to mess up for that to happen.”

Today’s decision states that the Lukhovitsy court’s order to block the OVD-Info website has been overturned, and the case has been sent back for a new review. According to Samorukova, this usually happens when the first court makes errors that cannot be corrected on appeal.

“But it’s important not to have any illusions. I think the new decision will be almost word-for-word the same as before, except that this time Grigory Okhotin will be listed as the responding party,” the attorney concludes.