Bishkek City Court has upheld a decision to block the investigative news site Kloop.kg.
Kloop’s lawyer Fatima Yakupbayeva commented: “ It would be interesting to know what justified today’s judicial board of the city court’s ruling. We believe the decision is unlawful. A dangerous precedent is being set for online publications and everyone who disseminates information because with this court ruling [it appears] that it is possible not to address the distributor itself but to go straight to the Ministry of Culture and ask for it to be blocked. This violates the balance provided for by the law “On Protection from Inaccurate Information.”
Yakupbayeva added that Kloop will appeal the decision in the Supreme Court.
As previously reported, the Kloop.kg website was initially blocked as a result of an article in which the politician Ravshan Dzheenbekov stated that he was tortured while in prison. This led to a complaint by the State Committee for National Security to the Ministry of Culture.
Kloop’s Russian-language website has been blocked in Kyrgyzstan since September 2023. The Kyrgyz-language version was blocked two months later.
