A resolution, which was passed unanimously, said the ban be overturned as no such provision was in place in any other Muslim country.

Committee chairman Afrasiab Khattak of the Awami National Party, while reading the resolution, pointed out: “There is no ban on YouTube in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.”

Members of the human rights committee expressed concern over the long-running ban and maintained that YouTube could still be accessed through proxies and other means.

“The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority chairman has already told (us) that there is no advantage of the ban,” Khattak said. Committee members noted that Internet users could still access restricted videos, making the ban irrelevant. They also resolved to raise the issue on the floor of the Senate.

YouTube has been blocked since September 2012, when it refused to take down a film that was offensive to Muslims and had sparked protests around the world.

The committee was also told by the Sindh home secretary that the Protection of Pakistan Ordinance had been implemented in Sindh, angering some senators.

The MQM’s Nasreen Jalil said that more than 45 workers of her party had gone missing in recent days, while 20 had been killed ‘extra-judicially.’

Her statement was seconded by the PPP’s Farhatullah Babar, who said that following the implementation of the PPO, there had been increasing reports of extrajudicial killings in Karachi.

Committee members also condemned the attack on journalist Hamid Mir, calling it ‘an attack on freedom of expression’. The senators called on the government to take stringent action against those responsible. “The government should act to stem the rising tide of violence against journalists in the country,” PPP Senator Sehar Kamran said, adding that “media houses should also avoid levelling allegations against security agencies before an inquiry is conducted”.

The committee reacted sharply to reports of cannibalism in Bhakkar. “The government should either amend existing laws or introduce legislation against cannibalism,” the committee chairman said. The committee unanimously passed a resolution calling on the Punjab government to act swiftly against the two brothers accused of eating human flesh.

DAWN

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif is scheduled to visit New York on 23rd of this month to attend the UN General Assembly session and is due to fly to USA today (Sunday). During his weeklong stay in the US‚ the Prime Minister will address the UN General Assembly on 27th September in which he is set to highlight Pakistan’s point of view on various regional and international issues, besides domestic priorities.

Sources in telecom sector privy to the development told this scribe that YouTube is likely to reopen soon across the country as the Ministry of Information Technology and Telecommunication has dispatched a summary to the Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. They said that ostensibly necessary measures and arrangements to point out and immediately block the unbearable material from the Internet has been completed. And, with this, the sacrilegious material would be blocked or filtered with the assistance of Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTCL). A committee constituted by the ministry has already given his green signal to go ahead and recommended to reload the website, they added.

Since the incumbent PML-N government has sworn in power, it has been seriously contemplating over the controversial matter very sensitively to reopen the YouTube. A research had also been initiated by the telecom ministry to determine the YouTube links, which contained the sacrilegious movie, and also for blocking mechanisms for other URLs and links on both the Http and the secure Https protocols to ensure the restraint of controversial content.

During the last week of August last, Minister of State for Information Technology and Telecommunication Anusha Rahman Khan while taking to the media persons also said that YouTube would open soon and a cell has been established in PTA to point out and immediately block the unbearable material from the Internet. She also said that a team comprising experts was working hard round the clock to block the sites containing blasphemous material and about 4000 such sites have already been blocked. She said that the government was working on the issue involving blockage of YouTube and a committee consisting of 14 members had deeply worked on the matter and had put forwarded some recommendations for consideration to resolve the matter permanently. The committee recommended the government to open the website, she added.

The minister also said that with the help of free of cost filters from Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTCL) a trial was conducted and 4,000 URLs had been blocked successfully. She also informed the journalists that a response cell in PTA has also been established to monitor and immediately block the blasphemous material on the Internet following the refusal of the Google Inc. management to block those URL that contained unbearable material, she added.

The Google Inc had so far declined to cooperate with the government of Pakistan in removing unpleasant material from the websites and the honourable Supreme Court of Pakistan that found blasphemous material on the website ordered to suspend the YouTube in Pakistan. Moreover, the last government to quell simmering protests appeared after the release of anti-Islam amateur film “Innocence of Muslims”, had blocked YouTube in Pakistan in 2012. And, a decision to close YouTube in Pakistan was also taken by the Inter-Ministerial Committee. In accordance, the IT ministry ordered PTA to block the websites. Similarly, a policy directive was also issued by the ministry in May 2012 and advised the PTA to deploy a state of the art technical solution to proactively and independently block blasphemous and pornographic matters from the websites.

Interestingly, the IT ministry had earlier also taken up the matters with the management of YouTube and Facebook for blocking the blasphemous content from websites. In response, Facebook had restricted the access and upload of the video on the website. But, the Google Inc did not remove the sacrilegious content by saying that YouTube complies with international laws that are subject to the laws of United States that, however, do not comply with Pakistan-specific content removal request.

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The court during previous hearings had remarked that it was important to understand the nature of the problem. In today’s digital age, the court had observed, information on the Internet could not be blocked, it could be intelligently regulated. There were no borders or walls that could limit this information from flowing into Pakistan unless of course we shut down Internet completely and severed our links with the outside world.

It appears that a sustainable answer to the problem was self regulation at the individual and house-hold level. World Wide Web has all sorts of information ranging from ‘very useful’ to ‘out right offensive’.

The choice is ours, we can either draw upon the useful information for our national development or fall prey to the negative content and immerse ourselves into moral and cultural chaos, the judge said, adding that the choice was ours. He said that, in the end, the responsibility and the choice was of the individual to watch or not watch a controversial website as the same could not be effectively blocked according to the level of technology present in our country today.

The court was hearing the petition filed by an NGO. The petitioner submitted that any filtering and blocking on internet was counter productive and predatory.

The petitioner sought directions for the Ministry of IT and the PTA to reopen the functioning of YouTube. He said taking away YouTube’s access was the modern equivalent of taking away the scholar’s pen.

He appealed to the court to order the restoration of access to the YouTube in Pakistan.

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For an entire year now we have had to make do without one of modern civilisation’s most comforting creations – YouTube – just because some loser who is now languishing in jail put up a trailer for a movie that was never even made. We ended up punishing the estimated seven million Pakistanis who use YouTube just to ‘protect’ them from something they either would never have heard about or shown no interest in perusing. And we have continued doing so for 365 days! At this point our nose is so disfigured only rhinoplasty will restore it.

Nothing is more annoying than the smug self-satisfactory ignorance of those who support the ban. There are many, who obviously understand nothing of how YouTube, or indeed the internet, works who have gleefully explained how the ban in Pakistan is costing Google so much lost revenue. Such inconvenient facts, like YouTube not making any money from the country because it doesn’t have a country-specific site here or that it loses nearly half a billion dollars a year, do not matter to a mind that closes itself off to reason.

A recent online poll conducted about YouTube in Pakistan found that over 60 percent of people claim to use the video-sharing site for educational purposes. In an equally unscientific assertion, I would venture that more than 50 percent of those people were lying, unless education is defined as learning about the art of reverse swing from old clips of Wasim and Waqar. Those who want YouTube unblocked are already ceding a lot of ground when they try to defend the site as a tool for learning rather than what it really is: lots and lots of fun.

The one thing this country could use is people who stand up for having a good time. There are a lot of things that can’t be defended on the grounds of utility but still provide much joy to the world. Failing to acknowledge the pleasure principle is what has led to all those fun things still being illegal which were outlawed more than three decades ago in Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s last-gasp attempt to save his rule.

Since ZAB’s time there has unfortunately been a surge in the kind of people who HL Mencken described as harbouring the “haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy.” Fighting back against that mindset on all fronts is mandatory if we don’t want censorship and a loss of liberty to continue for another three decades.

The YouTube ban, powerful though it is as a symbol of censorship since it most affects the wealthy who are only used to the freedoms of others being taken away, is only one example of the killjoys encroaching on our right to seek what the US Declaration of Independence called the “pursuit of happiness.”

In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa the MMA government became notorious for defacing and tearing down billboards and giving a good go at destroying Pakhtun cinema. Self-righteous thugs and charlatans have attacked theatres, enacted the harassment of innocent teen couples for the enjoyment of the moral police watching along on their TV screens and cast judgement on anyone who does not live their life the exact way they want them to. And all of us have been too scared to speak out for fear of being cast as irreligious or, horror of horrors, secular.

Pakistan has become a country where we are no longer to pursue what makes us happy, even if isn’t hurting anyone else. The professional scolds in society are no longer content to mind their own business despite being under no compunction to alter their lifestyle from the evil secularists. This is why those who denounce extremists on both sides are being so disingenuous. There is only one side that is giving the other marching orders and shoving their virtues down our throats. The other side would just like to be left alone and for everyone to be free to choose which lifestyle they prefer.

The debate – to the small extent that it exists – has been framed as one between virtue and sin rather than freedom and censorship. This is why nothing remotely positive will be written about anything that has been denounced by a small but extremely vocal minority. Everyone is simply too cowered by them, and the threat of violence implicit in their moral denunciations, to mount a challenge. The ban on YouTube was meant to stave off any potential violence that may have been caused by the offending trailer. Yet, we still had violence just a few days after the site was blocked. Now a year later the ban has become the norm and, in an inversion of the way things should be, we have to argue that the ban is illogical rather than forcing proponents of the ban to explain why it still continues.

Freedom in this country is nothing but a poetic truth trotted out around election time so that we can be proud of being a democracy. For true freedom to prevail – the kind where preening moralists and fearful governments cannot simply snatch away anything they don’t want us to enjoy – the ballot box is only the first rest stop in a long journey.

The writer is a journalist based in Karachi. Email: nadir.hassan@gmail.com

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