Azerbaijan wants to close anonymizers to block “harmful” sites

Baku / 05.06.20 / Turan: Anonymizers may be blocked in Azerbaijan - programs that open access to sites blocked in the country - Meydan TV, Radio Azadlig, newspaper Azadlig, Turan TV and Azərbaycan saatı.

According to Meydan TV, the plenary session of the Supreme Court made such a decision based on the cassation appeal of the Ministry of Communications and High Technologies.

For the first time, the Ministry of Communications and High Technologies demanded that anonymizers in Azerbaijan be blocked in April 2017 at the trial, when five of the above sites were blocked. The Sabail district court did not satisfy this part of the lawsuit, and the Baku Appeal and Supreme Courts upheld the decision. Three years later, the Ministry again raised this issue by filing an additional cassation appeal against the Plenum of the Supreme Court.

The  above sites sharply criticize the policies of the Azerbaijani authorities. For this reason, they were blocked in the country. However, all these resources successfully operate on Facebook and Youtube, so blocking anonymizers will not give the desired result.

Khalid Agaliyev, a media lawyer, believes that the Ministry of Communications seeks to limit critical Internet voices as much as possible. The lawsuit of the Ministry of Communications from 2017 contained a request to block not only the five above-mentioned sites, but also their pages on Facebook and Youtube, as well as those sites that reprint materials from prohibited sites.

Then the courts did not support this claim, but three years later the Supreme Court “changed its mind”, considering the arguments of the Ministry of Communications as justified, and returned the case to the Court of Appeal.

Website blocking can now be bypassed through resources such as cameleo.xyz, NoBlockMe.ru, daidostup.me, www.sostav.ru, browsec, and many others.

The practice of blocking anonymizers in other countries usually failed. –02D-