Pakistani Court Rules On Internet Censorship: Unconstitutional

Fluffeh writes "It looks like some Pakistanis are taking on 'the man.' With plans laid by the Pakistani Government that could sink up to fifty million websites that it isn't a fan of, Pakistanis took the matter to court — which ruled that such action by the government was unconstitutional. Reporters without Borders was however a little more skeptical 'The high court's ruling, if respected, would make it impossible for the government to introduce any nationwide website filtering system. While welcoming the ruling, which penalizes the lack of transparency in the PTA's past website blocking, Reporters Without Borders calls for vigilance because the PTA could try to circumvent it by devising a constitutional procedure based on the anti-blasphemy law and national security provisions. '"

Re:LOL

[JoshuaZ]

Actually that's pretty inaccurate. I'm going to ignore the obnoxious racism in your comment and just address the freedoms issue. No major government body in the US is trying to block fifty million websites, and if they did, the entire Supreme Court would tell them no. And the US rejected any form of blasphemy laws as unconstitional quite some time ago. Pakistan still allows the execution of people for blasphemy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blasphemy_law_in_Pakistan [wikipedia.org]. Shabaz Bhatti http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahbaz_Bhatti [wikipedia.org] was assassinated just for trying to lessen the penalties on the blasphemy laws. As to the matter of grope sessions to fly planes- Pakistan has essentially close to almost no equivalent of Fourth Amendment protections. The US and Europe are not in great shape right now, and there's no question that human rights have been getting better in Pakistan in the last few years (especially post-Musharraf), but let's not lose perspective here on overall which is set of countries is doing better for human rights.