The Wikimedia Foundation Asks The European Court Of Human Rights To Rule Against Turkey's Two-Year Block Of All Wikipedia Versions

Legal Issues

from the probably-won't-do-much,-but-should-annoy-Gollum dept

As numerous Techdirt stories attest, the Turkish authorities — and the country’s notoriously thin-skinned President, Recep Erdogan — are unwilling to accept even the slightest criticism of their actions, from any quarter. That has led to huge numbers of Turkish citizens being thrown in prison on the flimsiest pretexts, as well as many Internet sites being blocked in a similarly arbitrary way. Perhaps the most significant digital victim of Turkey’s paranoia is Wikipedia. In April 2017, every language version of the site was blocked under a law that allows the authorities to ban access to Web sites deemed “obscene or a threat to national security“. According to The Atlantic, Wikipedia was blocked because it refused to take down an article that claimed Turkey was “aligned with various terrorist organizations“.

For the last two years, all Wikipedia sites have remained blocked in Turkey. Now, the Wikimedia Foundation, which hosts Wikipedia, has had enough:

Today, we proceed to the European Court of Human Rights, an international court which hears cases of human rights violations within the Council of Europe, to ask the Court to lift the more than two-year block of Wikipedia in Turkey. We are taking this action as part of our continued commitment to knowledge and freedom of expression as fundamental rights for every person.

This is not a step we have taken lightly; we are doing so only after continued and exhaustive attempts to lift the block through legal action in the Turkish courts, good faith conversations with the Turkish authorities, and campaigns to raise awareness of the block and its impact on Turkey and the rest of the world.

The Wikimedia Foundation says that the block was applied because of two articles, not one, but gives no details. In its application to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) — not to be confused with the better-known Court of Justice of the European Union — it argues:

the blanket ban of Wikipedia violates fundamental freedoms, including the right to freedom of expression as guaranteed by Article 10 of the European Convention. Moreover, these freedoms have been denied to the more than 80 million people of Turkey who have been impacted most directly by the block, and to the rest of the world, which has lost the nation’s rich perspectives in contributing, debating, and adding to Wikipedia’s more than 50 million articles.

Even if the Wikimedia Foundation wins its case, there is not much that the ECHR can do to force Turkey to comply with a decision that the block should be lifted. It’s true that Turkey is a long-standing party to the European Convention on Human Rights (pdf), and that the fundamental rights provided by the Convention are guaranteed in the Turkish Constitution. But given the track-record of the Turkish authorities of ignoring all outside calls and criticism, we can probably expect more of the same if the ECHR finds against Turkey. On the plus side, this kind of high-profile tut-tutting from arguably the top human rights court in the world would doubtless annoy Erdogan hugely, so there is that.

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Filed Under: european court of human rights, human rights, recep tayyip erdogan, turkey, website blocking
Companies: wikimedia foundation, wikipedia