Ukraine’s parliament is to consider a bill that would grant prosecutors and the National Security and Defense Council powers to block websites they deem threatening to national security – without a court ruling.
A court will have to confirm the blocking of a website within 48 hours, however.
All the same, the bill has been lambasted by critics as an attempt to introduce wide-ranging censorship of the internet and crack down on opposition sites ahead of the presidential election in March 2019.
The authorities have denied this is the purpose of the proposed legislation.
The bill was submitted to parliament in July 2017 but only included on the Rada’s agenda on June 21. The Rada could now consider it during its next session from July 3- 6.
The bill was sponsored by Ivan Vinnyk, a lawmaker from President Petro Poroshenko’s Bloc, and People’s Front lawmakers Tetiana Chornovol and Dmytro Tymchuk.
Under the bill, websites can be blocked if they “have an impact on decision making, or the action or inaction of national or local government bodies, officials of these bodies, associations of citizens, or legal entities.”
Sites can also be blocked if they “threaten national security, aim to intimidate the population, provoke a military or an international conflict, or attract the public’s attention to a convict’s (terrorist’s) certain political, religious or other views.”
If an internet provider fails to comply, it must pay 1 percent of its annual revenues as a fine. For repeat offenses, the fine is 5 percent.
The bill immediately drew sharp criticism.
“The People’s Front appears to have gone crazy,” Olga Chervakova, a Poroshenko Bloc lawmaker and deputy head of the Rada’s freedom of speech and information policy committee, said on Facebook on June 21. “…The blocking of sites without a court decision is a throwback not even to (ex-President Viktor) Yanukovych, but to Stalin!”
She said even Yanukovych’s “dictatorial laws of Jan. 16, 2014,” which greatly restricted civil liberties, stipulated that sites could be blocked only by courts.
Chervakova said that any civic oversight or protests could be interpreted as “influencing government bodies and state officials” according to the law.
But Vinnyk, a co-sponsor of the bill, said that the accusations were “groundless.”
“I can’t understand how this is being interpreted as an attack on free speech or censorship, because the law does not even mention mass media,” Vinnyk told the Kyiv Post. “It’s stupid to pretend that the problem of cyberterrorism doesn’t exist.”
He also said that currently internet providers cannot be forced to block sites even by courts, and the bill aims to make it compulsory if there is a threat to national security.
Vinnyk said that at present the blocking of sites depends on the “good will” of internet providers.
