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KARACHI: The Sindh High Court on Wednesday ordered the federal government to restore social media platform X within one week, a lawyer said.
Since February 17, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter has experienced rare accessibility. This came after imprisoned former Prime Minister Imran Khan’s party called for protests against a government official’s admission of vote manipulation in February’s election.
Pakistan’s communications authority later admitted in court documents that it had been instructed by the Interior Ministry to shut down the site.
Moiz Jaaferi, a lawyer contesting the ban, told AFP that the Sindh High Court has granted the government one week to retract the order. Failure to do so will prompt the court to take appropriate action at the next hearing.
The court’s ruling is anticipated to be released in the forthcoming hours.
According to a report submitted to the Islamabad High Court in a separate challenge to the shutdown and shared with the media, the Interior Ministry stated that the platform was blocked on security grounds.
“The federal government has the sole authority to determine what falls under the terms of ‘defense’ or ‘security’ of Pakistan and what measures are necessary to safeguard national security,” the report, presented by Interior Secretary Khurram Agha, stated.
Both the government and the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) refrained from commenting on the outages for weeks.
The interior ministry implied that intelligence agencies were responsible for the order.
The report stated that shutting down a social media service “upon request from any security or intelligence agency” is “well within the scope of provisions of the PTA act.”
Activists challenging the shutdown argued that it was aimed at stifling dissent following the contentious February 8 polls, which were marred by allegations of rigging.
Access to the platform has been sporadic, sometimes available for brief periods depending on the internet service provider, forcing users to resort to virtual private networks, according to Alp Toker of the NetBlocks internet monitor.