Judge asks what PTA has done about blasphemous material

LAHORE: The Lahore High Court has ordered the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) on Wednesday to inform the court about the steps taken to ensure that blasphemous material, which is accessible via the internet was made inaccessible to the country’s populace.

Justice Ijaz Ahmed Chaudhry of the LHC issued this order during the hearing of a petition that seeks a permanent ban on Facebook, a social networking website, for hosting an event that is offensive to Islamic religious sentiments, namely Everybody Burn A Quran Day. The petition has been filed by the Judicial Activism Panel (JAP).

The website has previously faced an interim ban by the LHC for hosting a competition that called for submitting caricatures of the Holy Prophet.

The petitioner submitted that Facebook had announced an Everybody Burn A Quran Day and was displaying sacrilegious pictures of the Ka’aba in Makkah.

He prayed that Facebook be permanently blocked/banned in Pakistan for hosting such offensive material and should be prevented from committing further blasphemy in the country. He requested the court to launch contempt of court proceedings against the owners of the website and ensure that they were punished accordingly. He also prayed that the telecommunication authorities should be ordered to ensure that no blasphemous material was published, displayed or aired in the country.

Appearing on court notice, the director telecom wireless, Mudassir Hussain, said that when they observed the blasphemous content on the website, they informed the Facebook authorities who proceeded to remove them. He added that such content was not only removed from Facebook, but from other websites including Youtube as well. He said there were many other websites that displayed such material; however, nobody seems to have raised their voice against them.

He said that there was an Inter-Ministerial Committee constituted by the prime minister in 2006 for the control of such material, and the petitioner should approach that committee for the removal of such objectionable material from the internet.

Muhammad Azhar Siddique, the petitioner’s counsel, said that in previous hearings, the director had claimed before the court that they would block the offensive material within twenty-four hours of its display. However, the objectionable material was still accessible and had not been removed.

The judge ordered the director to inform the court about the steps the organisation had taken to block the objectionable material from the internet.

At the director’s request, the judge allowed three weeks for the purpose. At the request of the deputy attorney general, the judge decided to combine two other petitions that were pending before the court concerning the same issue with this petition.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 5^th, 2010.