A Moscow court on Monday annulled the license of the Nóvaya Gazeta newspaper, one of the few independent media outlets in Russia. Those responsible for the publication decided to stop publishing it in March due to the situation created by the war in Ukraine. But this sentence would prevent him from resuming activity in the future, when the situation changes.
Moscow's Basmanny District Court of First Instance accepted the request that Russian media regulator Roskomnadzor made last July and declared Nóvaya Gazeta's registration "invalidated," giving it a legal license to publish.
Roskomnadzor filed two lawsuits, one for the print edition and one for publication on the Internet. The latter will be studied by Russian justice throughout this month.
Roskomnadzor argued that the statutes of the newsroom were not submitted within the deadlines established by the law on mass media. In 2006 these statutes were changed, but according to the agency they did not send the documents. In addition, he accused the newspaper of distributing material on its website without properly mentioning the "foreign agent" status.
The defense argued that the statutory changes were minor and did not need to be resubmitted to the record.
The director of Nóvaya Gazeta is the veteran journalist Dimitri Murátov, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 together with the Filipino journalist María Ressa.
Murátov assured this Monday that the decision made by the judges is an "insignificant political order". And he assured that they are going to appeal, since they delivered the documents on time years ago.
Nóvaya Gazeta was founded in April 1993. This group of pioneering journalists received the support of the former president of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev. The last leader of the USSR used some of the money he received from his 1990 Nobel Peace Prize to buy eight computers for the newsroom. Gorbachev, who died on August 30, was a shareholder of the newspaper.
Since Russia began its military actions in Ukraine at the end of February, Nóvaya Gazeta has received six notifications from the Prosecutor General's Office and Roskomnadzor demanding that it remove material from its website for containing, according to the lawsuit, "unreliable information of public importance."
After the passage in March of a law that carried criminal liabilities for discrediting the Russian armed forces with the dissemination of information, the newspaper removed material on the Ukraine conflict and stopped covering it.
Even so, Roskomnadzor later sent notices for failing to adequately point out in its reporting that the newspaper is labeled by Russian authorities as a foreign agent. Given this situation, Nóvaya Gazeta suspended its publication, both on paper and on the Internet, until the conflict in Ukraine ends.
Later, a part of the publication's journalists who left Russia created a new international project from Latvia, called Nóvaya Gazeta. Europe.
