Turkish court fails to hire ‘artificial vagina expert,’ acquits porn suspects

Aziz Özen - ISTANBUL

More than 81,000 websites, most of them pornographic, are currently blocked in Turkey. According to the monitoring website Engelli Web, 93.6 percent of these websites were censored by the TİB, Turkey's Internet watchdog.

A Turkish judge has taken full responsibility in a pornography case while acquitting the investigation’s suspects after the court failed to find an “expert on artificial vaginas.”Daily Hürriyet learned that the 26-year-old suspect, a businessman identified as Emre Ş, started to import realistic vaginas and other sex toys into Turkey two years ago. The second suspect, 29-year-old Kadir P., published the photographs of the products on his website for marketing purposes.The Telecommunications Directorate (TİB), however, took action against the men.The TİB, which was granted the authority to monitor Internet users and block websites and their content without court permission last year, filed criminal complaints against both men. After the investigation, the prosecutor asked the court to sentence both men to between six months and three years in jail, beside a hefty fine, claiming that they committed the crime of “publicizing obscene graphics, texts or remarks.”The Criminal Court of First Instance at the Anadolu Courthouse in Istanbul acquitted both suspects on July 1.According to the ruling seen by daily Hürriyet, the judge stressed that he evaluated the artificial vagina “with his own general knowledge” because the court failed to find an expert whose specialty covers the domain.As such, the judge added, Turkey’s criminal law does not specify which products should be considered obscene, which led him to issue the ruling that acquitted the suspects, who had imported the sex toys legally and advertised them with a parental advisory on their marketing website.The website, which is currently online and accessible in Turkey, displays sex toys only after logging in as a distributing agent of the importing company.More than 81,000 websites, most of them pornographic, are currently blocked in Turkey. According to the monitoring website Engelli Web, 93.6 percent of these websites were blocked by the TİB without a court order.