Photo: viburnum.ru
The Vilnius District Administrative Court has approved the decision on blocking the Sputnik Lithuania website, taken earlier by the National Commission on Television and Radio Broadcasting, Sputnik news agency reports.
Russkiy Mir reported earlier that the Lithuanian Radio and Television Commission announced its decision to block the Lithuanian portal of Sputnik. The reason is that the agency allegedly violated copyrights by illegally posting other people's publications. The Union of Journalists of Russia called on the international community to respond to the actions of the Lithuanian authorities. The organization is convinced that this decision violates the values of freedom of speech and journalism, which is unacceptable in a European state.
According to the head of the Union Vladimir Solovyov, the reason for the ban was the agency’s agenda, which does not fit into the “mainstream local channels”.
According to the union secretary Timur Shafir, representatives of Russian journalism in Lithuania have repeatedly come across the fact that the widely declared European values in practice do not have so much weight. In this case, the fact of belonging to the Russian media was enough to close it, Shafir stressed. He called on the OSCE, the Council of Europe and other European institutions to pay attention to this contradiction between the stated values and what is happening in reality.
Russkiy Mir
