MOSCOW, July 26 (RAPSI) - The Moscow City Court has upheld a ruling that blocked opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s Live Journal blog, a RAPSI correspondent reports from courtroom.

The court thus ruled against Navalny’s appeal that a blog with thousands of readers cannot be blocked because of two posts.  “The blog must be blocked in the public interest,” the prosecution claimed at the hearing.

As stated at the trial, one of the most popular political blogs on the Russian internet was blocked because of two posts. One of them concerned the Maidan riots in Kiev and called for supporting those convicted for organizing the Bolotnaya Square riots in Moscow. The other post was published the day before the verdict was announced in the Bolotnaya Square riot case, in which Navalny called for people to gather at the court that was hearing the case.

“Only calls for illegal activity can be blocked, not just any announcement. The verdict was announced publicly and visiting the courthouse is totally legal,”

Navalny’s representative Damir Gainutdinov insisted. The prosecution argued that public events at court buildings must be authorized by city officials.

The court also considered whether access to the entire blog should be blocked if only two posts received complaints. The prosecution pointed out that the law does not require identifying specific pages in a blog.

A representative of the Federal Agency for Consumer Protection added that the blog could only be blocked by the administration of Live Journal. It is unlikely that they could simply just block certain posts.

Alexei Navalny is an opposition politician and public leader and head of the Party of Progress. He ran in the 2013 mayoral election in Moscow and writes one of the most popular sociopolitical blogs, which was put on the list of prohibited sources after allegedly encouraging people to participate in unauthorized public events.

Navalny was sentenced to five years in prison for embezzlement in the Kirovles case and was also implicated in several other criminal cases.

Currently, he is under house arrest in an embezzlement case at Yves Rocher Vostok, the company’s East Europe subsidiary that sued Alexei Navalny and his brother for fraud and money laundering.

Navalny has denied all charges, claiming they are politically motivated.