Court Decision to Block bianet Made 'by Mistake', 135 Addresses Still Banned

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The Ankara 3rd Penal Judgeship of Peace is revealed to have made the decision to block access to bianet.org by mistake.

The Gendarmerie General Command made an application to the court on July 16, requesting an order of access block for 136 web addresses. The court issued the order of access block on the same day. However, the Command made another application the next day, stating that the request regarding bianet was made "by mistake," according to the case file the details of which were accessed by bianet's attorney Meriç Eyüboğlu today.

CLICK- Court Imposes Access Block on bianet

In its application on July 17, the Gendarmerie General Command stated, "In the list that was submitted in the attachment of the application, the URL address 'http://bianet.org/bianet', on the 14th place was included by mistake.

"Because the entire site will be blocked in the current form, we request the decision of access block to be corrected upon Article 8/A of the law no. 5651 by removing the decision."

The court, on the same day, ruled for "the removal of the order for "http://bianet.org/bianet" address and continuation of the order for other links."

"As a result of the examination on the file, it was ruled the decision should be sent to the Union of Access Providers," the ruling said.

Attorney Eyüboğlu: Orders were not issued to bianet

"The order of the Ankara 3rd Penal Judgeship of Peace was not issued to bianet. We learned about this order by coincidence. We applied to the court yesterday for the first time and learned that there was not a mistake in the decision and the block was not for one or several reports like the previous times but the entire web site/news portal as it was written in the decision," said attorney Eyüboğlu.

"I would like to particularly said that the court made things quite difficult for our attorney colleagues who went there for this purpose. After an insistent waiting, we were able to get a copy of the file. Fortunately, we were insistent about getting a copy of the entire file rather than just the relevant pages.

"Hereby, we found out that there was a second application by the Gendarmerie General Command and a second decision by the court.

"This decision, just like the first decision, was not issued to those concerned.

"On the other hand, the totally unjustified application by the Gendarmerie General Command and the totally unjustified order of massive censorship of the Ankara 3rd Penal Judgeship of Peace are still in existence.

"Of course, the removal of this unjust, baseless and bad decision for bianet does not remove the major and unjust intervention against freedom of expression, freedom of the press, and right to information. This decision should be removed for all the addresses." (VK)