Events
The applicant, a lecturer at a law faculty, is the founder of the non-profit civil society organisation cyber-rights.org and the website Bilgiedinmehakki.org. The applicant made an application to the Information and Communication Technologies Authority (ICTA) under the provisions of the Law on the Right to Information, requesting information on statistics regarding decisions to block access to websites. In this application, the applicant requested, firstly, detailed information on access blocking statistics for the catalogue offences listed in Article 8 of Law No. 5651, ex officio and judicial categories separately, and secondly, the number of access blocking decisions issued outside the scope of catalogue offences. The applicant appealed to the Information Acquisition Evaluation Board (Board) against the ICTA’s rejection. The Board rejected this objection as not justified.
Thereupon, the applicant filed a lawsuit for the cancellation of the rejection of his access to information application to the ICTA. The ICTA, on the other hand, claimed that the lawsuit should be dismissed on procedural grounds as the lawsuit should be filed before the Council of State, and on substantive grounds that it was not possible to accept the applicant’s request in accordance with the legislation and requested the dismissal of the lawsuit. The administrative court dismissed the case, and the Council of State upheld this decision on appeal.
Allegations
The applicant claimed that his freedom of expression was violated due to the rejection of his request to obtain information on the statistics regarding the decisions to block access to websites.
Court’s Assessment
Considering that the applicant is an academic working in the field of internet law and human rights, it has been concluded that his activities require a protection similar to the protection provided by the freedom of the press, that the request for information in dispute for the applicant is a prerequisite for the purpose of expressing the thought and that it is a necessary information to be accessed in order to be utilised in the process of formation of the thought.
In the concrete case, with regard to the first and second request of the applicant; there is no situation where the applicant caused a significant workload by requesting the information from the administration when he could filter and compile the requested information from publicly available sources himself, nor is there a situation where a significant workload is caused by requesting information based on more detailed parameters when the information already published according to the parameters selected by the administration is not deemed sufficient, nor is there a situation where a significant workload is caused by requesting information based on more detailed parameters or requesting information that is not even available to the administration. It was assessed that the request for information on access blocking statistics, which was made in order to contribute to the discussion on a matter of public interest, was necessary for the applicant, who is an academic working on freedom of expression on the internet and plays an active role in non-governmental organisations fighting against censorship on the internet, to carry out his studies on violations of freedom of expression in the online field.
The Constitutional Court decided that the freedom of expression was violated for the reasons explained.
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