Internet Watch Foundation

 

Baroness Howe of Idlicote asked Her Majesty's Government: Whether the United Kingdom is a party to any international treaties of legal obligations which seek to prohibit pornographic or paedophilic images on the Internet.

 

Baroness Scotland of Asthal: The United Kingdom is fully involved with international initiatives to combat the circulation of indecent images of children via the Internet. The Council of Europe Cybercrime Convention, signed in November 2001, aims to provide for common definitions and minimum standards for offences concerning child abuse images handled on computers. It also seeks to provide for investigative methods appropriate for the offences and for collecting evidence in an electronic form, and to define measures to ensure effective international co-operation. The UK is also signatory to a Council of the European Union Framework Decision on combating the sexual exploitation of children and child pornography, which is broader as it covers behaviour on or offline. In addition, the e-commerce directive, under Article 19, lays a general obligation on Member States to co-operate with each other in dealing with cross-border complaints about online services.

 

In the G8 group a strategy on "Protecting Children from Sexual Exploitation on the Internet" was adopted in October 2002. The strategy is designed to complement existing national and international initiatives, and has eight key objectives addressing: information and intelligence gathering, dissemination and sharing; victim identification; suspect location; legislation; law enforcement tools and training; industry and NGO co-operation; awareness building and prevention; and international co-operation. An important element of the strategy is an international child pornography image database. The database aims to act as a global respository of images with the capacity to carry out automated analysis. It would be a significant tool for law enforcement contributing to the identification of victims and offenders and analysis of images to establish locations and other linkages. An implementation study is currently being undertaken. The G8 has also established a network operating 24 hours a day for the exchange of information in investigations involving electronic evidence that require urgent assistance from foreign law enforcement, which now involves 33 countries.

 

However, there are no specific international initiatives dealing with images involving sexual or   violent activities among adults, as there is no international consensus on what constitutes obscenity, or when the freedom of an adult to have access to obscene or pornographic material should be constrained.

 

 Source: Hansard 23.2.4