Roskomnadzor, based on the decision of the Sovetsky District Court of Astrakhan, blocked the website of the project «Declarator» — an aggregator of officials' income declarations. The Astrakhan region prosecutor's office filed a lawsuit in the Sovetsky District Court of Astrakhan on May 12 demanding to block the website of the project «Declarator», RBC reported.
The agency stated that «Declarator» violates the law on personal data by publishing officials' property declarations. Referring to the law «On Combating Corruption», the prosecutor's office noted that declarations should be published on the official websites of government bodies.
On the «Declarator» website, it is noted that they took the declarations from the websites of government bodies themselves: «The consent of the personal data subject for processing these data is not required if the processed personal data became available as a result of their disclosure in accordance with federal laws. Therefore, the «Declarator» project is not obliged to obtain consent for processing personal data, as it uses only open and legal sources».
On May 16, the court ordered to block the «Declarator» website as a precautionary measure — until a decision is made on the lawsuit. The site indeed does not open in Russia without VPN, but the project authors have already created a «mirror».
«Declarator» — is a database about Russian deputies, judges, and officials. The project aggregates data about their incomes from open sources, including official declarations. At the end of 2022 and the beginning of 2023, Vladimir Putin allowed officials not to publish their declarations during the war. After that, many ministries and departments removed the income declarations of their employees for previous years, but everything remained in the «Declarator» database.