The government legalized expert commissions at Roskomnadzor

Roskomnadzor has published clarifications to the rules for maintaining the registry of prohibited sites. According to the department’s page, now a special expert commission will be officially involved in the blocking of resources, which, at the request of the RKN, will be able to decide whether to add a website or page on the Internet to the registry of prohibited information. Expert commissions from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, doctors, Rospotrebnadzor and the Federal Tax Service participated in the assessment of the unlawfulness of this or that information, but their activities were not officially registered.

The clarifications are fixed in the government resolution of March 21, 2017 No. 320 “On Amending the Decree of the Government of the Russian Federation of October 26, 2012 N 1101”. The document is available for review on the website of the Government of the Russian Federation.

According to the clarifications to the 2012 document, Roskomnadzor will be able to legally attract an expert commission to assess the illegality of information posted on the Network.
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“... to make a decision on classifying information as prohibited in particularly difficult cases, a special interdepartmental expert commission will be created, the composition and procedure for which is approved by Roskomnadzor,” the regulator’s website says.

Often, commissions are formed from representatives of interested departments. Representatives of Roskomnadzor may also be its participants.

A special piquancy of the situation is added by the fact that now, when the activity of the commissions is officially registered in the documents, it is not clear that it has greater legal force: a package of documents necessary for blocking documents and certificates from the initiating site entry in the register of the authority, or the decision of the “expert commission”.

The wording of the government resolution of 2012 lists the list of documents required for legal blocking of the site. In case of a lack of this information (a signed order from the supervisory authority, a page with illegal information with the official’s EDS, screenshots and other evidence), according to the norms of 2012, the RKN was obliged to return a request for clarification. That is, it was the only legitimate way to block a resource on the web.

In the decree of 2012, paragraph 10 of the document was stated as follows:

If the decision of the authorized body does not contain all the information necessary for making a register entry in the unified register, the Federal Service for Supervision in the Sphere of Communications, within a day, send a request to the authorized body to provide the missing information. Information on such a request must be provided by the authorized body within 24 hours. Until the specified information is received, the domain name and / or page index of the website on the Internet are not included in the unified register.

As amended on March 21, 2017, this item received an addendum, which, in theory, allows Roskomnadzor to legally involve an expert commission to make a decision on the available data in “particularly difficult cases”:

Authorized bodies can make a discussion on the recognition of information prohibited for dissemination in the territory of the Russian Federation at a meeting of the expert commission ... If the issue of recognizing information prohibited for distribution in the territory of the Russian Federation at a meeting of an expert commission is raised, the time taken by the authorized body is extended to 7 days.

The response time to the resolution of the expert commission for Roskomnadzor itself was increased from one day to a more comfortable seven. For what purpose it was done, the department does not specify.