Blanket Ban on the Internet and Legal Safeguards Provided Within the Scope of Freedom of Expression in the Jurısprudence of the ECHR and the Constitutional Court

Abstract

This article takes a comparative perspective to examine the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) and the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Turkiye on the issue of blanket internet access bans, centering on the critical role the internet plays in the information society and the protection of freedom of expression. The study emphasizes that the internet provides a much broader scope for both the protection and violation of thought and expression freedoms compared to the pre-internet era, and examines how this right should be concretized in the internet medium, considering the unique nature of the internet, through the jurisprudence of the ECtHR and the Constitutional Court. The work reveals that the ECtHR's jurisprudence has clarified the limits of access bans and interventions on freedom of expression and has standardized the legal safeguards that states must provide in relation to these interventions, and it has been determined that the jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court is parallel to that of the ECtHR. However, despite this, it is stressed that the ordinary legal authorities in Turkiye do not systematically implement the jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court, and that the Constitutional Court takes a very longtime to resolve the applications that come before it, arguing that in the current situation, the Constitutional Court is not an effective domestic legal remedy in disputes regarding blanket internet access blocks.