By DPA,
Islamabad : A Pakistani court Wednesday ordered the government to temporarily block the social-networking website Facebook after a controversy over a competition for caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed, media reports said.
The high court in the eastern city of Lahore issued the decree on a petition filed by the Islamic Lawyers Movement, seeking a ban of the website.
The petition said the “blasphemous competition”, scheduled to be held May 14-20 by one of the website’s user groups, would hurt the religious sentiments of 45 million Pakistani Facebook users.
“The honourable court has directed the government to block the Facebook website in Pakistan until May 31,” said the petitioners’ advocate Chaudhry Zulfiqar.
“Our plea was that if appropriate action was not taken against Facebook, countrywide protests could start in Pakistan,” Zulfiqar said.
The court asked the Pakistani government to raise the issue of the competition internationally.
The website facebakers.com claims that there are 2.4 million Facebook users in Pakistan, citing the networking site’s own user statistics.
Violent demonstrations erupted in 2006 in Pakistan over the publication of cartoons on the Prophet Mohammed in Danish newspapers Jyllands-Posten and Politiken.
Last week, Pakistan refused to renew the visa of a Jyllands-Posten correspondent, forcing him to leave the country.