On June 2, 2026, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) ruled in a judgment that reposting videos from a Russian broadcaster on a free personal blog is illegal. Although the blog is run by only three individuals and has no commercial purpose, the Court held that this constitutes a violation of economic sanctions imposed on Russia. In response, there has been strong criticism describing this as “backdoor censorship under the guise of economic sanctions” and “a clampdown on freedom of speech.”

After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the EU banned the broadcasting of content produced by Russian “propaganda outlets.” The case in question involved the German independent blog “Traugott Ickeroth,” which operates solely on reader donations and, in 2023, shared videos three times from RT, a broadcaster funded by the Russian government. A local German court had asked the CJEU to determine whether this constituted a violation of sanctions.

The Court’s ruling took issue with the mere use of videos produced by Russian media, regardless of who operated the site or whether it pursued commercial aims. As a result, there is growing concern that citizens operating publicly accessible websites could face criminal prosecution simply for sharing similar videos.

The first time that expressive activity in Europe itself became the target of sanctions was the case of Turkish-German film director Hüseyin Doğru, who was the first such example. According to an EU official document published in 2025, Doğru was accused of having ties to Russian state media and of “systematically disseminating disinformation, including spreading the claims of Islamist extremist terrorist organizations such as Hamas.” Doğru even faced restrictions on cash withdrawals from his own bank accounts.

There is also a movement to stifle speech in the United States. In 2025, the Trump administration imposed sanctions on Francesca Albanese, the UN Human Rights Council’s special rapporteur, who authored a report criticizing corporations that conduct business with the Israeli government. The U.S. Treasury froze Albanese’s assets and even excluded her from insurance coverage held by her husband, an economist at the World Bank. In May 2026, a federal district court ordered a preliminary injunction against the sanctions on the basis of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, but a week later an appeals court overturned this decision and allowed sanctions to be reimposed.

Moves to classify criticism as violations of economic sanctions, or to impose sanctions in order to silence and suppress dissenting voices, are spreading across countries and regions.

Learn more about the “information war” between Russia and the West → “The Disinformation Countermeasure Industry”

Learn more about other judgments of the Court of Justice of the European Union → “CJEU ruling recognizes autonomy for Western Sahara”

Court of Justice of the European Union, Luxembourg (Photo: katarina_dzurekova / Flickr [CC BY 2.0])