Moscow, May 8 (IANS/RIA Novosti): Moscow Arbitration Court has upheld a ban on Halloween-themed makeup tutorial video, which has been ruled by a state watchdog as "suicide promotion".

As of Tuesday, YouTube, which filed the lawsuit to appeal the ban in February, had not yet indicated whether it intended to appeal this ruling.

The original video, offering a three-minute-long instruction on how to fake slashed wrists using a dulled razor, cotton wool and fake blood, will under this ruling remain banned in Russia.

But its copies are accessible on YouTube.

The makeup tutorial video was among the first to attract the ire of Russia’s Consumer Rights Protection Service in line with a new content filtering law.

The legislation, passed last autumn (September to November) and now rigorously enacted by government agencies, allows websites to be banned, without recourse to the courts, for the "promoting suicide, paedophilia and drug abuse".

Independent watchdog Rublacklist.net claims that 19,700 websites are currently blacklisted in Russia and that 97 per cent of them are accidental victims of flawed blacklist technologies.