CJEU Clarifies The Term “Operator” Under Article 2f(1) Of Regulation 833/2014 And Departs From The European Commission’s FAQs

On 3 July 2026, the Court of Justice of the European Union delivered its preliminary ruling in Case C-67/25, R, N & K v Staatsanwaltschaft Saarbrücken, addressing the scope of the term “operator” in Article 2f(1) of Council Regulation (EU) 833/2014, which prohibits the broadcasting of content originating from entities listed in Annex XV of the Regulation. The judgment is notable both because it departs from the interpretation set out in the European Commission’s published FAQs on the Regulation, and because it clarifies that neither the commercial character of an activity nor the duration of a broadcast is determinative of liability under the provision.

The reference arose from criminal proceedings against three individuals who operated a website on which videos originating from a German-language channel of Russia Today, listed in Annex XV of Regulation 833/2014, were made available to the public. The website did not charge for access but solicited voluntary donations, which by the time of the proceedings had generated approximately €60,000. The defendants were prosecuted under the German Foreign Trade and Payments Act 2013, which criminalises breaches of directly applicable EU sanctions regulations, including Article 2f(1) as mentioned above. The referring court needed to determine whether the defendants fell within the personal scope of Article 2f(1) and specifically, whether the term “operator” is confined to persons engaged in a commercial or professional activity, or whether it extends to individuals whose only funding derives from voluntary donations. A second question concerned whether the prohibition applies irrespective of the length of the broadcast content in issue also arose from the case. 

To provide some context of the Regulation, Article 2f(1) prohibits operators from broadcasting, or enabling, facilitating, or otherwise contributing to the broadcasting of, any content by the persons, entities, or bodies listed in Annex XV, including transmission by any means such as cable, satellite, IP-TV, internet service providers, and internet video-sharing platforms or applications. The Commission’s FAQs on the Regulation had previously stated that “operator” should be understood as referring to persons carrying out a commercial or professional activity, implying that non-commercial actors, including donation-funded platforms, would fall outside the prohibition. This guidance is non-binding as a matter of EU law, but it had informed the compliance practices of a number of market participants prior to the judgment.

Following the case though, the Court held that “operator” is not limited to persons acting for commercial or professional purposes. It observed that in the majority of the authentic language versions of the Regulation, “operator” is not qualified by any reference to an “economic” activity, so there is no textual basis within Article 2f(1) for reading in a commercial threshold. The Court also considered the Regulation as a whole, noting that other provisions such as Article 3r(4) which expressly confines their application to “economic operators.” The deliberate use of qualifying language in some provisions, and its absence in Article 2f(1), was treated as indicative of a legislative choice rather than an oversight, consistent with the principle that where the EU legislature intends to restrict a provision to a defined category of actor, it does so expressly.

The Court further had regard to the purpose of Article 2f(1), which it identified as the protection of public order from disinformation attributable to listed broadcasters. An interpretation confining the prohibition to commercial operators would, in the Court’s view, undermine that objective, since non-commercial or donation-funded intermediaries are equally capable of disseminating the same content, are often harder to identify and monitor, and would otherwise present an evident avenue for circumvention were they excluded from the prohibition’s scope. On this basis, the Court concluded that the Commission’s FAQ guidance, insofar as it purported to limit “operator” to commercial or professional actors, could not be relied upon to narrow a directly applicable provision of EU law, given that such guidance is not binding and does not form part of the legislative text.

On the second question referred, concerning the relevance of the duration of the broadcast, the Court held that the Regulation draws no distinction according to the length of the content broadcast. Excluding short or fragmentary broadcasts from the scope of Article 2f(1) would, in the Court’s reasoning, invite circumvention through the disaggregation of prohibited content into shorter segments, frustrating the provision’s purpose in much the same way as a commercial-activity carve-out would.

The judgment carries several implications for the interpretation of EU restrictive measures. It confirms, consistently with established case law on the status of Commission guidance, that FAQs and similar non-binding instruments do not constrain the Court’s own interpretation of directly applicable EU legislation, so practitioners and compliance functions that have relied on the Commission’s FAQs as an authoritative statement of Article 2f(1)’s scope will need to reassess their position. 

The decision also confirms that the absence of a commercial-activity requirement in Article 2f(1) is to be read as intentional, by reference to the presence of such a requirement elsewhere in the Regulation. This is a methodological point of wider relevance to the interpretation of Regulation 833/2014 and comparable sanctions instruments, where the presence or absence of qualifying language in one provision may inform the construction of cognate provisions. In addition, the ruling forecloses reliance on either the non-commercial character of an activity or the brevity of a broadcast as grounds for excluding conduct from Article 2f(1)’s scope, a point of particular relevance to intermediary platforms, community or hobbyist websites, and individuals engaged in redistributing content from listed broadcasters, none of which can now assume that an absence of commercial motive, or the limited scale of the content redistributed, places their conduct outside the prohibition. Because several Member States, including Germany, have enacted domestic criminal offences for breaches of Regulation 833/2014, the practical consequences of the Court’s construction of “operator” extend to individual criminal liability, and not merely to administrative consequences for corporate entities.

As a whole, Case C-67/25 provides an important clarification of the personal and material scope of the broadcasting prohibition in Article 2f(1) of Regulation 833/2014. By declining to read a commercial-activity threshold into the term “operator,” and by confirming that the duration of a broadcast is immaterial to the application of the prohibition, the Court has adopted an interpretation that prioritises the underlying objective of the measure over the narrower reading previously reflected in the Commission’s non-binding guidance. 

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