Pavel Durov, the founder of the telegram Telegram telegram, who was charged with a series of crimes associated with illegal activity in the application last year, has been allowed to temporarily abandon the country.
Mr Durov had been banned from departure from France, but the office of the Paris prosecutor said on Monday that the investigative judges who were handling his case had raised travel restrictions between March 15 and April 7, when he had to return to France.
“I have returned to Dubai after spending several months in France due to research related to criminals’ activity in the telegram,” said Durov, a Russian businessman who also has nationality in France and the United Arab Emirates. “The process is in progress, but it is great to be home.”
Mr Durov, 40, was held near Paris last August and prevented from leaving the country while under investigation. It was a rare move by the French legal authorities, who personally demanded him complicit with the operation of an online platform that is considered to allow illegal activity. After being released by curating last year, he had to check in a police station twice a week.
Mr Durov faces a possible sentence of up to 10 years in prison. He was also accused of complicity in crimes, as it allows to distribute child sexual abuse, drug trafficking and fraud and refused to cooperate with law enforcement.
Mr Durov has criticized the French authorities for arrest, saying that he cannot personally be kept responsible for what users are publishing on Telegram. However, the company has made several changes since August to more aggressively police its platform and be more cooperative with law enforcement services around the world.
“When it comes to moderation, cooperation and combating crime, the telegram not only met but exceeds its legal obligations,” Mr Durov said on Monday.
Telegram, which Mr Durov founded in 2013, says it has more than one billion users. The sparse supervision of the content created by the user has made it popular among people living under authoritarian governments, but relaxed supervision has also allowed hate rhetoric and harmful content to swell.
The French case provided for an international debate on freedom of speech on the internet and the responsibility of technology companies to police the speech and actions of platform users. Some governments, especially in the European Union, are increasingly considering technology companies and are pushing them to tackle the safety of children, terrorism, misinformation and spread other harmful contents.
In France, the telegram participated in multiple criminal cases associated with child sexual abuse, drug trafficking and virtual hate crimes. Paris’s top prosecutor, Laure Beccuau, last year said that the Agency proved a “almost overall absence” of reaction when he was asked to work with law enforcement.
Mr Durov is among a small but growing list of high -level technology data, who have been accused of crimes committed by their platform users, including violations of Ross W. Ulbricht, the creator of the platform of Silk Road and Changpeng Zhao, the Founder of the Bin. Last year the annual annual for US money-launing infringements that received
President Trump gave Mr Ulbricht in January.
Aurelien Breeden References from Paris contribute.
