Search results : 241

Once again, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has found that Russia violated a journalist’s right to gather news (see also Butkevich v. Russia, IRIS 2018-4/2). The ECtHR found that the aggressive behaviour of a senior policeman trying to stop a journalist from taking pictures documenting a news story amounted to a breach of the journalist’s right to freedom of expression and information under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). The applicant, Yuriy Borisovich Basok, was acting as a freelance journalist for an Internet news portal when he was...

With two judgments delivered days apart in November 2019, the Moscow Arbitrazh Court (first instance for commercial disputes) sided with the former distributor of a Fashion TV channel in Russia in the dispute with the owner of the global brand and its local representative over the distribution rights of a worldwide television channel. This is a new chapter in the longstanding dispute, but the matter appears still far from being resolved.  Austrian Fashion TV Programmgesellschaft mbH and Russian Fashion TV LLC, its former official distributor, have been in active conflict since the brandowner...

In a case concerning the defamation of the Mayor of Moscow, Savenko (Limonov) v. Russia, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) found that the Russian Federation has violated the applicant’s freedom of expression as guaranteed by Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). The (alleged) defamatory statements where uttered during a debate on radio and published on the radio station’s website. The ECtHR disagreed with the assessment by the Moscow courts that in a case of defamation the suffering of the elected head of the executive had a much greater value than...

A Commission has been created in accordance with the Law on the regulation of online cinema services, adopted in 2017. The Russian Government has approved the composition of the Commission for the coordination of the ownership, management or control in relation to the owner of audiovisual services. The Vice Prime Minister Konstantin Chuichenko was appointed as Chairman of the Commission; the order was published on the Internet portal for legal information. The task of the Commission, as stated in the document, is to make decisions on the approval of the ownership, management or direct or...

On 21 November, 2019, at the third and final reading, the State Duma of the Russian Federation adopted the draft law providing the possibility of applying the status of mass media foreign agent to individuals. On 25 November, the law was signed by the President of the Russian Federation. The amendments suggest that the individuals can be recognised as "performing the functions of a foreign agent" on a par with legal entities if they create or distribute (including online) the information of the mass media foreign agent and at the same time receive money or material assets of foreign...