The Freedom of Expression Association reported on Tuesday that access to @tipgenelmerkez, the official X account of Türkiye İşçi Partisi, has been blocked under Article 8/A of Law No. 5651. The account has 582,000 followers.

The party holds three of the 600 seats in the Grand National Assembly. Its chair, Erkan Baş, sits in parliament alongside Sera Kadıgil and Ahmet Şık.

Which judgeship issued the decision is not known. Nor is the date it was issued, nor the file number, nor the grounds. The Association’s entry records the statutory provision and nothing else. bianet reported the same gap in plain terms: it is not yet known which court gave the decision. Cumhuriyet and Medyascope carried the story with the same absence.

Article 8/A permits content removal or access blocking where it is said to be necessary to protect national security or public order, or to prevent crime. Access providers must comply immediately and within four hours at most. In Artı Media Gmbh, decided by its Plenary on 14 September 2023, Türkiye’s Constitutional Court held that Article 8/A does not contain safeguards sufficient to prevent arbitrary interference with freedom of expression.

A party cannot appeal a decision it has not seen. The two-week period for objecting runs from service of the decision, and service is also what would identify the judge, the applicant and the reasoning said to justify the measure.

The block falls within a wave now in its sixth week. According to the Association’s figures, at least 1,270 X accounts with a combined 35 million followers were ordered blocked in September alone, more than in the whole of 2025, and X implemented about 90 per cent of those orders. The accounts of the Women’s Party were blocked on 5 October, and the personal account of Gelecek Partisi founder Yavuz Değirmenci on 22 September. As far as the Association’s record shows, the Türkiye İşçi Partisi account is the first belonging to a party represented in parliament.

Two days before this decision became known, 21 human rights and media freedom organisations issued a joint call to the Turkish authorities to lift the blocks and halt further restrictions. The signatories included ARTICLE 19, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the Committee to Protect Journalists, the International Press Institute, PEN International and the Association itself. They also addressed the platforms directly, asking them not to comply with blocking requests that contain no concrete reasoning or sufficient evidence, and to share blocking orders with the account holders concerned.

The same organisations identified a change made on 31 July, when Law No. 7590 transferred part of the Information and Communication Technologies Authority’s blocking powers to the Cyber Security Presidency, a body attached directly to the Presidency.

The blocked account is the channel through which a party in parliament addresses the public. The decision closing it has not been published, and the party has not been told who made it.