MOSCOW: A Russian court on Friday ruled to block the popular messaging application Telegram in the country, after it refused to give state security services access to private conversations.
The ruling follows a long-running battle between the authorities and Telegram, which has a reputation for securely encrypted communications, as Moscow pushes to increase surveillance of internet activities.
The Roskomnadzor telecoms watchdog, which brought the case, had earlier demanded that the service be blocked as soon as the verdict was announced.
Telegram was found to have breached a law that requires social media sites that use encoding to give the key to security services to decode messages.
The app’s maverick creator Pavel Durov wrote on social media, “Privacy is not for sale and human rights should not be compromised out of fear or greed.”
Dubbed Russia’s Mark Zuckerberg, Durov has amassed a fortune of $1.7 billion (1.4 billion Euros) at 33, according to Forbes.
He banned the lawyers representing Telegram from attending the court hearing so as not to legitimise the case.
But Pavel Chikov, who leads a group of human rights lawyers representing the app, said that the case has proved the efficacy of the service.
That authorities that brought the case showed that “Telegram is by far the safest messenger,” he said in comments published on the platform.
He said that the authorities also pushed “hundreds of thousands of Russian users to study proxies and VPNs” in an attempt to circumnavigate a potential ban.
Both Chikov and Durov had previously said that any ban would be impossible to enforce.
Durov, who left Russia in 2014 and is now based in Dubai, has long said that he will reject any attempt by the country security’s services to gain backdoor access to the app.
He previously refused to give security services the personal data of pro-European Ukrainian activists who were using the popular Russian VKontakte social media site he set up in 2006 and has now sold.
