On Monday, a Pakistani court ordered authorities to revive accessibility to social networking internet site Facebook right after organization officers reportedly apologized to get a web page deemed offensive to Muslims and removed its contents. The Lahore High Court imposed the nationwide ban virtually two weeks ago amid outrage about the page,
Microsoft Office 2007, which encouraged customers to publish drawings of Muhammad, as many Muslims take into account depictions of Islam’s Prophet to be blasphemous.
Earlier today, Justice Ejaz Ahmed Chaudhry of the Lahore Substantial Court reversed the 19 May order to the Pakistani authorities to block the website.
“Restore Facebook. We don’t want to block entry to information,” Justice Chaudhry told the court. He also requested the government to develop a system to find out how countries like Saudi Arabia were blocking accessibility to “blasphemous” content on the internet.
According to Bloomberg / BusinessWeek, the ban was lifted right after the court was told the firm had exchanges with Richard Holbrooke, U.S. special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Chaudhry Zulfiqar, the lawyer who asked the court to block the popular social networking internet site on May 19, told a Bloomberg reporter by telephone:
“The counsel for the state provided documents showing correspondence between the Facebook management and Richard Holbrooke. According to those documents, Facebook assured the court no blasphemous material will be available to end users in Pakistan.”
Pakistani authorities had also blocked access to YouTube for containing “un-Islamic content”, but this ban was at least partially lifted last week.
Bangladesh also decided to block Facebook this weekend but said it would restore entry to the web site if the offensive material was taken out.
More coverage on Reuters, Al Jazeera English, AFP and BBC.