Court Block

July 25, 2009 (AFP) - A Sri Lankan court has ordered a dozen websites to be blocked for allegedly containing pornographic material involving local women and children, a press report said Saturday.

The Telecommunications Regulatory Commission (TRC) was asked to block access to the 12 websites, including redtube.com, an adult-content sharing portal, the Lankadeepa newspaper said.

There was no immediate comment from the TRC, which a year ago announced it was filtering websites showing obscene, pornographic and other sexually explicit material.

Colombo Chief Magistrate Nishantha Hapuarachchi said the censorship order was issued following a police complaint that some videos contained Sri Lankan women and children and that the free access to the sites corrupted society.

The websites' owners have 14 days to respond and if they do not, the TRC has been asked to continue blocking those sites, the magistrate was quoted as saying.

Sri Lanka already maintains an unofficial ban on websites of dissidents by getting local Internet Service Providers to block access to those portals.

However, users can still access those sites by using proxy servers abroad.