Justice Mansoor Ali Shah of the Lahore High Court on Tuesday observed that one should not look for content [on the internet] one does not approve of. He was hearing a petition challenging the ban on YouTube.
He observed that not a single Muslim country, except Pakistan, had banned YouTube because of controversial material.
The court did not consider the written reply by the Ministry of Information Technology secretary in the matter as a policy statement and directed the minister to file it with her signatures.
Justice Shah observed that after the 18th Amendment, policy matters were for ministers to decide and no longer in the domain of secretaries.
Expressing disappointment over delay in the submission of the minister’s statement, the judge adjourned the hearing till March 13.
He observed that the minister must ensure that the reply reached the court by the next hearing.
At a previous hearing, the bench had summoned Minister Anushay Rehman before the court, but she did not appear. The court had also summoned her in August, when, too, she had not appeared.
During Tuesday’s hearing, the deputy attorney general informed the court that Rehman could not make it to the court due to security reasons.
However, IT Secretary Akhlaq Ahmed Tarrar appeared before the court and filed the reply, which the court allowed to be placed on record.
It ruled, however, that it could not be accepted as a policy statement since it was not signed by the minister.
Justice Shah ordered the secretary to tell the court on whose orders had YouTube been banned.
Deputy Attorney General Naseer Bhutta informed the court that the website was banned on September 17, 2012 on the orders of the Supreme Court.
The judge asked Bhutta to read out the operational part of the SC order. Bhutta complied. It transpired that the court had asked the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority chairman to block only objectionable material on the website.
The judge remarked that the court had ordered for blocking the objectionable material only, but the ministry had blocked the entire website.
When the judge asked Bhutta if there were any directions to block the entire website, he said there weren’t.
The secretary submitted that the ministry did not have the technology to block specific content from a website, so the entire website had gotten blocked.
The petition has been filed by Bytes for All, a non government organisation.
The petitioner has submitted that any filtering and blocking on internet is counter productive and predatory and sought directions for the Ministry of Information Technology and the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority to allow access to YouTube. The website was ordered to be blocked by former prime minister Raja Pervez Ashraf in September 2012 after YouTube administration refused to remove a blasphemous film.
Published in The Express Tribune, March 12th, 2014.