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 Turkey's Official Gazette on Thursday published the Constitutional
Court's ruling from Wednesday, further piling pressure on the
telecoms authorities to lift the ban.
The Telecommunications Presidency (TIB) blocked access to Twitter on
March 21 after Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said he would "root
out" the network following a series of anonymously posted audio
tapes purporting to expose corruption in his inner circle days ahead
of nationwide elections.
"We think it (the ban) needs to end, and if there has been a court
decision, we think it needs to be implemented quickly, as quickly as
possible," Marie Harf, deputy spokesperson at the U.S. State
Department, said, according to an official transcript of a press
briefing on Wednesday.
"Obviously we don't think YouTube should be banned either."
Google's video-sharing website YouTube is also offline in Turkey,
the TIB having blocked it one week after blocking Twitter. Legal
challenges against the YouTube ban are pending.
Now that the ruling on Twitter has been issued by the official state
publication, the TIB is expected to consider the court's call to
lift the ban, which caused public uproar and global condemnation,
led by the United States.
"WORKAROUNDS"
"We welcome this Constitutional Court ruling and hope to have
Twitter access restored in Turkey soon," the San Francisco-based
company said in a tweet.
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President Abdullah Gul, who has opposed the bans, was quoted as
saying both should now end.
"The bans on Twitter and YouTube now need to be lifted. I've
expressed this to the minister and to the authorities," he said,
according to Radikal newspaper on Thursday.
Erdogan's critics saw the ban as the latest in a series of
authoritarian measures to crush a corruption scandal that had grown
into one of the biggest challenges of his 11-year rule.
Tech-savvy Turks quickly found workarounds, with Internet analysts
reporting a surge in tweets since the ban was imposed, but the issue
has become a tug-of-war between Erdogan's administration and the San
Francisco-based microblogging site, which has also challenged the
move.
Erdogan and his Islamist-rooted AK Party emerged far ahead of rival
parties in municipal elections on Sunday that had become a
referendum on his rule.
(Writing by Daren Butler and Ayla Jean Yackley;
editing by Clarence
Fernandez and Ralph Boulton)
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