The Mystery Behind the Article on “Secret Officials”

The human rights group of lawyers and journalists, “Team 29,” has reported that Roskomnadzor intends to block their article, “Secret Advisor: How St. Petersburg Authorities Hide Employees,” published on January 16, 2018. The regulatory agency sent them an official notification regarding this action.

“This means our website could be blocked as soon as today,” the human rights advocates explained. “By law, blocking should only occur after a court decision, but we were not notified about any hearing.”

To recall, in 2018, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation ruled that courts must notify website owners about hearings in cases related to website blocking. However, as is often the case, judges ignore the decision of Russia’s highest judicial authority—apparently, the same happened with Team 29.

To prevent the site from being blocked, the article was removed from the specified link. However, it can still be found in the Internet Archive, is available in Google’s cache, and on Archive.is.

⛔️ Roskomnadzor has added the article we published in 2018 to the list of banned materials. Apparently, this text defamed someone’s honor and dignity. Whose honor, we do not know—we have not seen any court decision, and we were not summoned to court.
https://t.co/tNLIE4xlFO

Team 29 also decided to re-upload the article that raised concerns with Roskomnadzor and an as-yet-unknown complainant to a different page.

“We will look into the situation and search for the court decision, because we are intrigued—whose reputation is allegedly harmed by the information in this article?” wrote Darya Sukhikh, Team 29’s senior lawyer.

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