Pavel Durov, the founder of the messaging app Telegram who was charged in France last year with a range of crimes related to illicit activity on the app, has been allowed to temporarily leave the country.
Mr. Durov had been barred from leaving France, but the Paris prosecutor’s office said on Monday that the investigative judges handling his case had lifted the travel restrictions between March 15 and April 7, when he must return to France.
“I’ve returned to Dubai after spending several months in France due to an investigation related to the activity of criminals on Telegram,” said Mr. Durov, a Russian-born entrepreneur who also has citizenship in France and the United Arab Emirates. “The process is ongoing, but it feels great to be home.”
Mr. Durov, 40, was detained near Paris last August and barred from leaving the country after a rare move by French legal authorities, who charged him with complicity in managing an online platform to enable illegal transactions by an organized group.
Mr. Durov is facing a potential sentence of up to 10 years in prison. He was also charged with complicity in crimes such as enabling the distribution of child sexual abuse material, drug trafficking and fraud and refusing to cooperate with law enforcement.
Mr. Durov has criticized French authorities for the arrest, saying he cannot be held personally responsible for what users post on Telegram. But the company has made several changes since August to more aggressively police its platform and to be more cooperative with law enforcement agencies around the world.
“When it comes to moderation, cooperation, and fighting crime, for years Telegram not only met but exceeded its legal obligations,” Mr. Durov said on Monday.
Telegram, which Mr. Durov founded in Russia in 2013, says that it has more than one billion users. Its sparse oversight of user-generated content has made it popular among people living under authoritarian governments, but the lax supervision has also allowed hateful rhetoric and harmful content to fester.
The French case stoked an international debate about freedom of speech on the internet and tech companies’ responsibility to police the speech and actions of platform users. Some governments, especially in the European Union, are increasingly scrutinizing tech companies and pressuring them to address child safety, terrorism, disinformation and the spread of other harmful content.
In France, Telegram has been involved in multiple criminal cases tied to child sexual abuse, drug trafficking and virtual hate crimes. A prosecutor in Paris, Laure Beccuau, last year said the organization demonstrated a “near-total absence” of response when asked to cooperate with law enforcement.
Mr. Durov is among a small but growing list of high-level tech figures who have been accused of crimes committed by users of their platforms, including Ross W. Ulbricht, the creator of the Silk Road virtual black market, and Changpeng Zhao, the founder of Binance, who pleaded guilty last year to U.S. money-laundering violations that took place on his cryptocurrency platform.
President Trump pardoned Mr. Ulbricht in January.
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