The amendments in the Russian Civil Code, which protect the human rights for private life, take effect on Tuesday, the Russian pro-governmental daily Rossiiskaya Gazeta reported. The courts will issue some kind of safe-conducts from alien’s entries to a person and if the unpleasant information for him or her has been spread in the Internet they will mop it up.
Thanks to these amendments a new legal provision was supplemented with the term ‘non-material values’. This is the life and health, personal dignity, personal inviolability, honor and good name, inviolability of private life, housing inviolability, personal and family secret, freedom of movement, freedom of choosing the place of stay and residence.
Under the new law the information defaming a person can be removed from the Internet. On the court verdict it is possible to confiscate information mediums in the electronic way without any compensation.
Apart from the long-standing ban on defiling lie, for instance, in the dissemination of information about non-existing criminal prosecution, for the first time the rule was introduced for the protection of people if false information, but not offensive for them is being spread. For instance, the reports that citizen N received an inheritance worth of several millions of dollars. If it is untrue they will have to dismiss it.
Several provisions of the law evoked noticeable concerns in the journalist community. The balance between the protection of private life and the right of society to know the truth about other people is not violated, is it? Say, a villa of a certain public servant on the Spanish Riviera is the private life or a reason for the information campaign? The State Duma lower house of Russian parliament explained to Rossiiskaya Gazeta that under the law the gathering and dissemination of information about the private life of a person in state, public interests are not the violation, and there are some things that the society has the right to know by definition.
Other important amendments were also introduced in the law. The law holds that the results of works and services, but not the very works and services, as it was stipulated until recently, are entities of civil rights. “For instance, if your repairs have been done for a long time, but the result is not seen or does not suit you, you should not pay for the senseless fuss of repairmen,” Chairman of the State Duma Committee for Civil, Criminal, Arbitration and Procedural Legislation Pavel Krasheninnikov added.