Administrative Court rules to ban access to porn websites again

In a recurring call from the judiciary, the State Council Administrative Court has ruled that cabinet must block all access to pornographic websites through Egypt.

On Wednesday the chief justice of the Administrative Court, Judge Yehia Dakroury, issued a ruling obliging Prime Minister Ibrahim Mehleb and his government to take the necessary measures in order to block porn websites across the country.

“Finally… Administrative Court rules to block pornography sites,” reads a headline on the website of the state-owned Al-Ahram on Wednesday.

Citing the court’s finding, the state-owned Al-Akhbar news portal reported that this ruling was based on the principles of Islamic Sharia.

According to Al-Akhbar, the court had found that access to “porn websites does not fall within the realm of freedom of expression, as such sites detriment the higher interests of the state, as well as national security and societal security.” 

The Al-Ahram news portal congratulated the judiciary on its ruling to ban porn sites from Egypt, and mentioned that Minister of Communications and Information Technology Khaled Negm had been complaining about the lack of legal authority to ban such sites.

The first instance in which Egypt’s judiciary ruled on the banning of pornographic websites was in May 2009, when the Administrative Court had accepted an appeal by Islamist Lawyer Nizar Ghorab to block access to such sites across the country.

In light of this court verdict and the rise of Islamists to power in November 2012, then-Prosecutor General Abdel Maguid Mahmoud ordered state authorities "to take necessary measures to block any corrupting pornographic imagery that is inconsistent with the values ​​and traditions of the Egyptian people and the higher interests of the state."

However, the Egyptian state has not yet been able to enforce any of these judicial orders.

Critics of this porn ban and specialists in information technology (IT) claim that it would be nearly impossible for the state to track and block access to the endless and growing list of pornographic sites available on the Internet.

In a host of local news outlets, IT specialists claim that filtering and blocking porn sites on the Internet is a gargantuan and costly task for state authorities, although it is not clear how much this could cost the state.

IT specialists also point out that there are several means by which to circumvent such filters – if they are ever imposed – including changing one's IP (Internet Protocol) address to make it appear as if the user is accessing such sites from beyond Egypt, or the use of proxy servers to access such sites, along with other Internet access points and means of entry.