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Khabarovsk Court Bans YouTube for ‘Extremism’

By Alexandra Odynova

The St. Petersburg Times

MOSCOW — A Far East court has banned YouTube and four other web sites for “extremist” content in a ruling that promises to raise new worries about free speech.

The Internet is widely recognized as the last uncensored media in Russia, and the ruling nudges the country toward the likes of Iran and Pakistan, which have blocked YouTube.

Incidentally, the court’s decision also bans videos by President Dmitry Medvedev.

The Komsomolsk-on-Amur City Court said Rosnet, a Khabarovsk region Internet provider, must block three online libraries — Lib.rus.ec, Thelib.ru and Zhurnal.ru — as well as YouTube.com and Web.archive.org, which stores archived copies of old and deleted web pages.

YouTube.com was banned for the nationalist video “Russia to Russians,” which was ruled extremist by a Samara court in November and subsequently placed on the Justice Ministry’s federal list of banned extremist materials.

The other four sites contained Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” blacklisted by an Ufa court in March.

Once added to a list of extremist materials, a book or video can only be removed by another court ruling. The list, first published in July 2007, has since swelled from an initial 14 items to 686.

Judge Anna Aizenberg passed her verdict on YouTube on July 16, but the decision was only made public on Wednesday, when Rosnet filed an appeal.

The provider said it has proposed several ways to filter the illegal content without blocking access to the entire web sites, but the court has ignored all alternatives.

“Not a single one of our employees supports or condones extremism,” Rosnet said in a statement.

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