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Telegram lawyers appeal court’s order to block messenger

The judge said the court’s decision would be implemented immediately and the ban on access would be in force until the FSB’s demands were met

© Sergey Konkov/TASS

MOSCOW, April 17. /TASS/. Telegram lawyers have appealed the Tagansky court’s order to block the messenger immediately, one of Telegram’s lawyers, Pavel Chikov, said on Tuesday.

"We appealed the immediate action taken on the decision to block Telegram in the Moscow City Court," Chikov said in his Telegram channel. He published a scanned copy of the appeal.

The text of a private appeal letter submitted on behalf of lawyer Ramil Akhmetgaliyev, says the decision to immediately block the messenger was taken contrary to legal procedures and contained no evidence that a delayed enforcement can lead to substantial violations of the rights of the owners of personal data.

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"The damage to public and private interests is done the other way around - through an immediate blocking of the Telegram, and not through actions (inaction) of the latter," the document said. "Active actions of Roskomnadzor (Russia’s telecom and media watchdog) to block it, taken before the decision enters into effect, substantially restrict the rights of citizens and other organizations," it added.

On April 13, Moscow’s Tagansky court ruled to block access to the Telegram messenger in Russia over its failure to furnish keys to the Federal Security Service to decrypt user messages. The court satisfied the lawsuit of Russia’s telecom watchdog Roskomnadzor filed on April 6.

The judge said the court’s decision would be implemented immediately and the ban on access would be in force until the FSB’s demands were met.

Telegram said this demands would be impossible to implement since the keys were stored in the users’ devices.

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