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Moscow court to consider blogger Navalny’s lawsuit against media watchdog on February 26

On February 26, a court in Moscow will hold a pre-trial preparation hearing of a lawsuit that blogger Alexei Navalny filed against Russia’s media watchdog

MOSCOW, February 26. /TASS/. On February 26, Moscow’s Tagansky District Court will hold a pre-trial preparation hearing of a lawsuit that blogger Alexei Navalny filed against Russia’s media watchdog Roskomnadzor, which had demanded that information about Navalny’s investigation concerning businessman Oleg Deripaska be deleted from his website, the court’s press service told TASS.

"On February 20, 2018, Moscow’s Tagansky District Court received an administrative lawsuit filed by Alexei Navalny against the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media," the court’s spokesperson Yulia Sukhinina said, adding that "a pre-trial preparation hearing is scheduled to take place on February 26."

On February 10, Roskomnadzor notified Navalny that two of his website’s pages had been included in the list of information banned from circulation. The media watchdog cited a ruling issued earlier by the Krasnodar region’s Ust-Labinsky District Court.

Deripaska’s lawsuit

Deripaska filed a lawsuit against Anastasia Vashukevich and Alexander Kirillov, who had posted private photos of Oleg Deripaska on their social media accounts, as well as audio recordings of his conversations, thus violating his privacy. The lawsuit did not directly concern Navalny, who had used the content available on social media for investigative purposes. The court upheld the plaintiff’s request and ruled that access to Deripaska’s personal information be blocked until the dispute was resolved.

Navalny’s website, the webpage dedicated to his investigation concerning Deripaska and Deputy Prime Minister Serge Prikhodko, as well as the relevant YouTube video, were earlier included in the list of information banned from circulation. Both Deripaska and Prikhodko say that the information the blogger made public is untrue.

The relevant information has already been deleted from Instagram accounts.