In July 2016, a district court in St. Petersburg ‘Vyborg Court’ blocked a crypto media website Bitcoininfo.ru from providing its service to the country’s inhabitants. The case was reviewed without inviting the owners of the website to go through the initial trial process.
The spokesman of the website Sarkis Darbinyan previously stated that about 100 crypto-related websites have been blocked without prior notice to the site owners.
“Examination of prosecutors’ applications in practice takes place without the involvement of site owners, they are not previously sent for removal of prohibited information, and the city court refuses to accept appeals after the actual blocking of websites, so today’s decision of the Supreme Court should change the situation,” Darbinyan said.
According to the material of the case, the website was blocked because it contains illegal information on cryptos that “do not lend themselves to state control, promote the growth of the shadow economy and do not have certain consumer properties.”
After the blockage, the City Court of St. Petersburg refused to reconsider the complaint of the owners. However, the complaint was submitted to the Supreme Court. The position of the site owners was that there is no ban on the sharing of information about cryptocurrencies in the legislation of the Russian Federation neither did the site offer visitors the opportunity to trade cryptos on the platform.
The Supreme Court, therefore, ordered the city court to review the case.
“Send an appeal against the blocking of the Bitcoininfo.ru website for consideration by the St. Petersburg City Court,” the judge ordered.
After considering the complaint, the St. Petersburg City Court annulled the District Court’s decision of not recognizing the content published on the Bitcoininfo.ru website.
The new decision comes at the time when the country is in the process of compiling and setting up regulations for the crypto space, which is expected to be fully enacted before the end of the year.