Ground views: Sri Lanka: Saturday, December 09, 2017.
On November
8, 2017 news began to spread that website Lankaenews had been blocked across
all Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in Sri Lanka. The website itself has
continually been mired in controversy in 2016, a lawyer filed 14 contempt of
court charges against its editor, for making defamatory statements towards
judges. Yet the blocking of the site is also chillingly reminiscent of 2010,
when the site was blocked before the release of the results of the Presidential
election. Following this, the website was blocked again in 2011, along with
several others, including Groundviews and Transparency International a move
which drew condemnation from the Committee to Protect Journalists. At the time,
the TRC denied that the sites were blocked. The Pugoda Magistrates Court also
ordered the police to arrest the LankaeNews editor in 2011, for publishing a
false report on an ongoing issue pending in court. More recently, President’s
Counsel Hemantha Warnakulasuriya implicitly admitted that LankaeNews had been
blocked, commenting in his capacity as a member of the Telecommunications
Regulatory Commission (TRC).
Given that
the Rajapaksa regime regularly and arbitrarily blocked websites critical of its
policies, this move was cause for concern. After civil society flagged the blocking of
Lankaenews, Groundviews, Vikalpa and Maatram filed RTI requests in order to
gain more information around the process of the blocking of news websites.
These were
the questions submitted to the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission on
November 10:
- Complaints against news websites received by TRC from January 2015 to date and identity of authorities making requests
- Any websites blocked to ISPs in Sri Lanka as a result of complaints from 2015 onwards, and reasons given for the block
- Any complaints against news website Lankaenews in 2017, and identity of State authority making the complaint
- Any order to block Lankaenews in November 2017, identity of the authority making the order and reasons given for the same.
- Records of TRC involvement in blocking Lankaenews, if any.
It has to be
noted that sister website Maatram, which publishes content in Tamil and filed a
request three days later, on November 13, faced numerous difficulties. The TRC
asked Maatram if they could not submit their request in English or Sinhala, and
admitted it would have to outsource translation of the request, as they were
not equipped to process it. In fact, the TRC said this was the first RTI
request they had received in Tamil.
Our sister
website Vikalpa, which publishes content in Sinhala, also lodged RTI
applications with the TRC on similar grounds. However, both Vikalpa and
Maatram’s requests were rejected on grounds of national security. This was
particularly odd given Warnakulasuriya spoke about the block on national
television, as the Island article revealed.
On the other
hand, the TRC did respond to Groundviews on November 28, noting that question 1
was “not under their possession, custody, or control”. Questions 3, 4 and 5
were rejected on the grounds that it would undermine the defence of the State
or national security, under Section 5 of the Right to Information Act. However,
they did release a list of websites blocked by the TRC. (Question 2 of the
request). It has to be noted that while Maatram also asked for details of
websites blocked to Internet Service Providers from 2015 onwards, they did not
receive this information presumably because the material was unavailable in
Tamil.
The
information released by the TRC revealed that 13 websites had been blocked from
2015 onwards. The websites blocked included a number of websites publishing
political news, and a few sites publishing pornographic material.
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