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Associated Press | November 2, 2010

ANKARA, Turkey – Turkey’s telecommunications authority will again block access to YouTube unless the video-sharing site removes a sex video of a former opposition party leader, the state-run news agency reported Tuesday.

The threat of a new ban comes just three days after Turkey had ended a more than two-year ban on YouTube.

The Anatolia news agency said a court, considering a complaint by lawyers representing former opposition party leader Deniz Baykal, ruled that YouTube must be blocked and notified the telecommunications authority of its decision on Tuesday.

Telecommunications officials would now either ask YouTube to remove the video or block access to the site, the agency said.

Scott Rubin, a spokesman for Google, which owns YouTube, had no immediate comment on the possibility of a renewed ban, saying he had no information “beyond what I have also read or heard anecdotally.”

Access to YouTube had been blocked in Turkey since May 2008 because of videos deemed insulting to the country’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Turkey restored access on Saturday, after the offending videos were removed.

It is a crime in Turkey to insult Ataturk, who founded Turkey in 1923 after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The country has implemented reforms as part of a bid to join the European Union, but still faces questions about its record on free expression.

Turkey began blocking access to websites in 2007, after parliament adopted a law against cyber crime in an effort to curb child porn, prevent the dissemination of terrorist propaganda and stamp out illegal gambling.

More than 6,000 sites have been banned in Turkey according to Engelli Web, a site that monitors blocked pages.

Former opposition leader Baykal resigned in May after the video showing him having an affair with his aide appeared on the Internet.

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Turkish Weekly | September 27, 2010 

Bans on websites containing a small amount of content in violation of Turkish law may be depriving people of their constitutional right to free access to information, according to a legal scholar in Istanbul.

The popular websites YouTube and Google are among those Turkish users often have difficulty reaching, a problem the country’s president chalked up to tax-related issues, rather than censorship, in a recent speech.

“The law initially aimed to protect children and families, but it has mostly been used for political control and censorship,” Yaman Akdeniz, a lawyer and professor at Istanbul Bilgi University, told the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review late last week after an informational meeting. The meeting is a first step toward discussions that will be held among civil-society organizations and the Parliament on the “Internet ban” law in Turkey.

Law No. 5651, which entered into force in November 2007, followed by the approval of three related bylaws, authorizes the country’s courts or its telecommunications authority to cut off access to Internet websites under certain circumstances.

“Banning access [to Internet sites] does not solve the problem,” Akdeniz said, adding that problems such as child pornography, libel and the like, included in the framework of the law’s eighth article, cannot be solved in this way. Even if the law could solve such problems, blanket bans on access would be a disproportionate response, he said.

Akdeniz also said there were many gaps in the law and existing provisions were not being implemented properly by the relevant public authorities. “Those who commit crimes such as posting child pornography are not punished by the Internet ban,” he said, adding that it is the general public that is harmed by such bans.

“This is why I believe the law takes a disproportionate approach,” he said, explaining that criminals are left free to repeat their crimes while innocent people are deprived of the ability to use Internet website sources for educational, informational and other legal purposes. Moreover, Akdeniz said, the Turkish penal code already covers the crimes listed in Article 8 of the Internet ban law.

Once a court decides to ban access to certain Internet sites, the decision can be appealed within 10 days after it enters into force, a procedure Akdeniz objected to. “I see banning access to information as a violation of my constitutional rights,” he said, adding that there should be no time limit to appeal Internet ban decisions.

Moreover, Akdeniz said, even when he had appealed such decisions on time, the court said he had no right to appeal as he was not a party to the case, something he said was also unjust. “The wrong methodology is being applied,” he said.

Akdeniz also said Internet ban decisions carried the status of preventative measures, which had to be temporary in legal terms, but whose effects could eventually last permanently.

“The validity time for such decisions must be determined either by law, or by a court decision,” he said, explaining that the court had said in related decisions that a ban would be annulled once the violation of law No. 5651 had ended.

“This also constitutes a concern,” Akdeniz said, adding that Turkish courts considered the violation ended only if the content violating Turkish law cannot be accessed from anywhere around the globe. “Although many website-managing companies, such as YouTube, can localize an access ban to [block] content that violates Turkish laws within Turkey, Turkish court decisions have no jurisdiction across borders,” he said.

President Abdullah Gül said Friday in a speech to students at Columbia University in New York that blocking of websites in Turkey was due simply to unresolved tax issues. “A problem that stands is that some Internet sites are unreachable in Turkey, but this is not a result of censorship,” Gül said. “Tax laws have not been updated, and I have urged them to do so.”

Responding to the idea that certain Internet sites had been blocked because their owners had not paid taxes in Turkey, Akdeniz said Turkish tax law does not include any provisions predicting this scenario.

“Turkey is a country that aspires to join the EU, but its Internet policies are approaching [those of] China,” Akdeniz said.

The academic said after having exhausted all legal channels within the Turkish system, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg is a last resort, a place where the issue may find a resolution that does not violate people’s fundamental right to be informed and get access to information.

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By Tom Wright, Marc Champion And Amir Efrati | The Wall Street Journal | June 26, 2010 

A move by Pakistan to begin monitoring for anti-Islamic content on major websites—including those run by Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc.—is the latest sign that censorship looms as a threat to Internet companies in a number of countries.

The Pakistan announcement on Friday came a day after a communications minister in Turkey, which has blocked thousands of sites including Google’s YouTube, said the video site was “waging a battle against the Turkish Republic” and suggested that the situation could change if Google were to register and pay taxes.

Authorities in Pakistan on Friday said they would start monitoring major Internet search engines, including Google and Microsoft Corp.’s Bing.com, as well as the e-commerce giant Amazon.com Inc. The move follows an action last month against social-networking site Facebook Inc., which Pakistan blocked for several weeks after it hosted a page in which users could post pictures of the Prophet Muhammad. The portrayal of Muhammad is forbidden by Islam, and the ban was lifted when the site removed the page.

A YouTube spokeswoman said it was aware of the actions announced in Pakistan and said it will work to keep its services accessible there. “Google and YouTube are platforms for free expression, and we try to allow as much content as possible on our services and still ensure that we enforce our content policies,” she said.

She added that the company remains “disappointed” about the continuing ban on YouTube in Turkey “against a safe and lawful international service enjoyed by millions of people around the world.”

Regarding Pakistan’s decision, a Microsoft spokeswoman said, “Government decisions to restrict online content should respect the rights of individual users and be adopted through open, transparent and publicly accountable processes.” A spokeswoman for Yahoo said the company “was founded on the principle that access to information can improve people’s lives, and we are disappointed to learn about the monitoring and possible blocking of our sites in Pakistan.” Amazon declined to comment.

Google and other Internet companies have helped some Asian countries, such as India and China, enforce certain standards online by removing material that governments find objectionable or violate local laws. YouTube blocks access to videos in Thailand that might be seen to insult the king—which is against the law in that country—and Nazi imagery that is illegal in some parts of Europe.

Earlier this year Google stopped self-censoring its Internet search results in China after complaining it had been hit with a cyber attack originating from that country. China’s own Internet filters now censor Google’s searches.

A number of countries in the Islamic world, including Iran and Saudi Arabia, have banned Internet content in the past for being sacrilegious. But those countries have authoritarian governments that closely monitor the Internet and the media. In Pakistan, where Islamists have vied with secular-minded politicians since the country’s creation in 1947, the implementation of such bans is fraught with difficulties.

On Friday it remained unclear how the state-run Pakistan Telecommunication Authority would be able to monitor millions of links on the Internet to ensure blasphemous material wasn’t appearing on sites like Google and Yahoo.

In Turkey, Google has been the most prominent victim of a 2007 law that has resulted in the closure of thousands of websites, putting the government under pressure in recent weeks as newspapers and opposition parties have begun to cry foul over the restrictions being placed on ordinary web users.

In May 2008, a Turkish court shut down access to Google’s YouTube due to material posted on the site that was found to be insulting to the nation’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

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Earlier this year Turkey’s communications ministry extended the ban to other Google sites, a move that appeared to be triggered by a separate tax battle with the U.S. giant. As a result, Turks suddenly lost direct access to GoogleMaps and other sites, as well as to YouTube. However, many ordinary users have been able to circumvent the closures.

The opposition People’s Republican Party, usually a fierce defender of Ataturk’s honor, on Thursday attacked the government in parliament for creating what one parliament member called a “culture of censorship” in the country, including Internet censorship.

Some of Turkey’s top leaders have sought to distance themselves from the Internet closures. President Abdullah Gul earlier this month sent out a public message through his account on micro-blogging site Twitter.com, saying he “cannot approve of Turkey being in the category of countries that bans YouTube [and] prevents access to Google.”
Write to Tom Wright at tom.wright@wsj.com, Marc Champion at marc.champion@wsj.com and Amir Efrati at amir.efrati@wsj.com

Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

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Reuters

Europe’s main security and human rights watchdog said on Monday that Turkey was blocking some 3,700 Internet sites for “arbitrary and political reasons” and urged reforms to show its commitment to freedom of expression.

Milos Haraszti, media freedom monitor for the 56-nation Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), said Turkey’s Internet law was failing to preserve free expression in the country and should be changed or abolished.

“In its current form, Law 5651, commonly known as the Internet Law of Turkey, not only limits freedom of expression, but severely restricts citizens’ right to access information,” Haraszti said in a statement.

He said Turkey, a European Union candidate, was barring access to 3,700 Internet sites, including YouTube, GeoCities and some Google pages, because Ankara’s Internet law was too broad and subject to political interests.

“Even as some of the content that is deemed ‘bad’, such as child pornography, must be sanctioned, the law is unfit to achieve this. Instead, by blocking access to entire websites from Turkey, it paralyzes access to numerous modern file-sharing or social networks,” Haraszti said.

“Some of the official reasons to block the Internet are arbitrary and political, and therefore incompatible with OSCE’s freedom of expression commitments,” he said. Asked about the OSCE remarks, a Turkish transport and communications ministry official who asked not to be named told Reuters: “Turkey provides unlimited and equal access for all parts of society. It is above the EU average on this issue.

“The regulations over Internet have a dynamic structure and necessary legal changes are made when problems are detected in implementation,” the official added.

Haraszti said Turkish law was still failing to safeguard freedom of expression, and numerous criminal code clauses were being used against journalists, who risked being sent to jail as a result.

Fears for press freedom in Turkey have risen following state attempts to collect a $3.3 billion fine from major media group Dogan in a tax row, part of pressure on Dogan to obey a law limiting foreign ownership of Turkish firms.

In October, the European Commission’s annual report on Turkey’s progress toward EU membership urged Turkey to treat Dogan fairly and said Ankara needed to do more to protect freedom of expression and the press.

(Additional reporting by Hatice Aydogdu in Ankara; Writing by Mark Heinrich; Editing by Noah Barkin)