Lesbian Website Blocked over "Obscenity"

Turkey’s only lesbian dating website, www.lezce.com*, has been banned for “obscenity”.

“Since obscenity can’t be constituted by looking at user name and password page on our home page, it has obviously been aroused by the name ‘lezce’. We are face to face with an administration that is aroused by letters. These practices encourage homophobia by state itself”, said administrator of the webpage that operates in membership system.

Lezce.com content advisor and administrator Erman Paçalı speaking to bianet said they couldn’t find any addressee as to blocking decision and that they will file a complaint to administrative court to grant a motion for stay of execution.

“We’ve sent our petition to TİB (Presidency of Telecommunication) but it is unclear when they will respond since there is no law imposing TİB a time limit. TİB experts conveyed via central office that they won’t contact us directly. We can’t find any addressee. It is not clear what is obscene in the content and what sort of evaluation they made.

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“This decision violates the principle of equality. We will go to district administrative court to stop the execution. We want oral hearing because we want to express ourselves”.  

TİB doesn’t inform

Paçalı said they have tried to contact TİB but they couldn’t receive any information regarding even the ground of the decision.

“Whenever we wished to contact with the institution, they express that there is prime ministerial circular stating experts cannot be met with. Thus, as far as we understand there is a circular allowing them to not meet with anyone if they wish to do so.”

Paçalı added that TİB has taken the decision based on “reasonable doubt”, and “in order to constitute reasonable doubt, there must be a content in line with that. However, our home page doesn’t have any content except for user name and password panel, and TİB doesn’t present any content as to the ‘doubt’”. (ÇT/TK)

* Lez is shortened for lezbiyen, which means lesbian, and Lezce stands for Lezbiyence, which means lesbianish.

Click here to read the article in Turkish