Administrative and criminal liability for refusing to remove illegal information has been established

On Tuesday, October 2, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed amendments to the legislation[1], which establish that

• Administrative liability for failure to comply with the bailiff’s demand to stop distributing information;
• Administrative liability for failure to comply with the bailiff’s request to refute previously disseminated information;
• Criminal liability for obstructing the execution of a court decision imposing obligations to stop the dissemination of information or to publish a refutation;
• Criminal liability for malicious failure to comply with a judicial act by a citizen who is not a civil servant of state bodies and organizations.

Despite the urgency of the problem of ignoring court decisions, cases of sanctions by the state for such violations are still quite rare. Interestingly, the amendments adopted focus specifically on the area of “censorship” of information. The majority of the types of violations identified in the amendments concern the refusal to stop the dissemination of information or the refusal to publish a refutation.

Such a selective approach by the legislator, of course, raises questions. For example, for such a violation, a legal entity may be subject to an administrative fine 3-4 times higher than that imposed for failure to comply with the decisions of other courts. A citizen can be arrested for a period of up to 15 days or involved in mandatory work for up to 200 hours. It is not difficult to notice how the state accentuates, determining the cost to the violator of which court decisions will be more expensive to ignore. Wouldn’t this approach turn out to be a threat to freedom of speech and freedom of expression?

The situation is aggravated by some ambiguity in the new version of Article 315 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. It introduces liability for (a) malicious failure to execute a decision, as well as (b) obstruction of its execution by the debtor (i.e. the defendant), previously punished for failure to execute the same decision to remove/remove information in an administrative order. The question arises: what exactly can be “obstruction of execution”?
In other words, will it be considered as such only if the requirement to remove the content is ignored, or will the proposal to view the blocked “defamatory information” through VPN-service also become the basis for bringing to responsibility?

So far, the law (as well as its concise explanatory memorandum) leaves this issue open.

On the other hand, the new amendments may become an effective weapon against unscrupulous violators. First of all, the new rules will be applicable in cases of protection of honor, dignity and business reputation, as well as in cases related to the protection of confidential information (this may be information about private life, and, for example, information constituting the secret of production). As can be seen from the new amendments to the law, such disputes may well move from civil to administrative or criminal proceedings.

1] Federal laws of 02.10.2018 № 347-FZ, № 348-FZ.

Legal Alert has been prepared by IP/IT Maxima Legal.