LHC chief justice seeks report on Facebook action

[Lahore_Real_Estate]

LAHORE: Lahore High Court Chief Justice Ijaz Ahmed Chaudhry on Thursday directed the ministry of foreign affairs to submit a report about the progress made on the court’s earlier orders to raise the issue of blasphemous material on Facebook on the international level.

The chief justice had earlier directed the ministry to lodge a protest against Facebook in the United Nations General Assembly and the platform of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference to demand an end to such offensive acts.

Deputy Attorney General, Naveed Inayat Malik, assured that this order will be complied with. He said representative of the Foreign Office was present and a detailed report on the matter, as required by the court, will be submitted on the next hearing.

The chief justice was hearing several identical petitions filed by Pakistan Judicial Activism Chairman Muhammad Azhar Siddique and others. A report was submitted before the court on Thursday on behalf of the Ministry of Information and Technology, according to which an inter-ministerial committee was working diligently to block the display of objectionable material on websites, including Facebook. According to this report from last July, the committee had blocked hundreds of websites which contained anti-Islam or blasphemous material.

In July 2010 around 171 websites were blocked, 85 were blocked in August, 113 in September, 29 in October, 27 in November, 48 in December and 35 this month. Various techniques are used all over the world to block objectionable websites, and until now it was difficult in Pakistan to monitor blasphemous material on the Internet in the absence of any action against it.