The Turkish Constitutional Court decided that TIB's blocking of the video sharing platform YouTube was unlawful and should have been be lifted as it violated Article 26 of the Turkish Constitution (freedom of expression) and individual rights. The decision followed a petition promoted by a number of legal scholars, Youtube, and civil rights activists. Akdeniz and Altıparmak drafted the petition stressing that the YouTube access ban not only obstructed freedom of expression, but also curtailed people's right to obtain information..
Following a decision of the 5th Criminal Court of Peace of Istanbul Anadolu, TIB banned two Twitter accounts, discussing the government related corruption news that appeared in the mainstream and social media in Turkey in March 2014. The claimants, a Minister and one of his sons, requested the Court to ban access to the posts published through the Twitter account "Hirsiza oy yok", "@oyyokhirsiza" ("@No vote for thief), which allegedly published content that constituted an explicit violation of the claimants' personal rights. Twitter objected to this decision, since the content published fall under the scope of media freedom of speech.The 18th Criminal Court of Peace accepted Twitter's arguments and cancelled the previous decision, since it was in contrast with the Turkish Constitution. The 18th Criminal Court also...
The Court in Ankara ordered TIB to stay the execution of a blocking order banning access to Twitter in Turkey after receiving an appeal filled by the Turkish Bar Association, Turkish Journalists Association and the Deputy President of the Nationalist Movement Party, Oktay Vural, directly against the decision of TIB. Shortly thereafter, the ban on Twitter was lifted also in response to a decision of the Turkish Constitutional Court (see above).
(1) Last.fm was blocked by Turkish courts at the request of a local group representing rights holders. It was challenged by the applicant simply as a user of the site, without involvement by last.fm or local ISPs. He was denied standing by Turkish courts. (2) The Second Section ECHR found that the applicant could not claim to be a victim of an Article 10 violation. Two main arguments were put forward to sustain the inadmissibility decision: (a) the content was available to the applicant through other means and was not ‘of special interest’ to the applicant (cf. Khurshid Mustafa case where Iraqi family was prevented by landlord from installing a satellite dish to receive Arabic channels not available otherwise) (para. 25); (b) the case did not raise an important question of general interest – i.e. it was not political...
(1) 19 articles of the Omnibus Bill amend Law No. 5651. These amendments place the Internet service and access providers under the obligation of (i) establishing, within 3 months from the enactment of the omnibus bill, a “Union” with headquarters in Ankara that will be under the control of the Presidency of Telecommunications and Communication (TIB), whose members will be the sole entities entiled to obtain an "activity cerificate" and, therefore, provide Internet access and services in Turkey; (ii) writing the by-law of the Union that must be approved by TIB: (iii) paying administrative penalties if the establishment of the Union will not happen within the prescribed deadline, (iv) keeping the access logs for two years and provide them to TIB whenever required, (v) immediately implementing the blocking orders given by...