Europe adopts British curbs on Internet porn

A voluntary British scheme for getting child pornography off the Internet is likely to be extended across Europe, EU ministers decided yesterday.

The scheme includes a hotline for users to report illegal material, and a rating system which allows parents to censor offensive images.

The move to clamp down on paedophiles using the Internet follows agreement by home affairs ministers meeting in Dublin on Thursday to step up police co-operation to combat paedophile rings.

Telecommunications ministers meeting yesterday in Brussels indicated they would opt to rely on a voluntary code of conduct, to be developed between the Internet industry, police and national justice ministries, rather than any new EU legislation. The self-regulatory approach is the one followed in the Safety Net proposals announced in Britain earlier this week.

"The UK measures are a very good example of what can and should be done. They will probably form the basis for our approach," the Irish minister Michael Lowry said. Legislation would be "difficult if not impossible".

Britain's science and technology minister, Ian Taylor, warned, however, against over-reacting. He said only 137 of a total of 16,000 newsgroups on the Internet are thought to diffuse illegal material.

The definition of what constitutes illegal material varies considerably, raising doubts about the value of EU co-operation. But Mr Taylor said it would be an offence to download child pornography in Britain, whatever its country of origin.

Mr Taylor welcomed the Court of Appeal's decision in London yesterday to uphold the convictions of two men jailed for distributing child pornography on the Internet. The court rejected their argument that images stored on computer disks did not constitute photographic images.

Dismissing the appeal by Alban Fellows, 26, and Stephen Arnold, 24, Lord Justice Evans said: "There is enormous disquiet at the potential which the Internet offers for the international transmission of pornography, in particular for those whose perverted tastes include collecting and viewing indecent photographs of children ... Heavy deterrent sentences must be imposed when serious offences, which are not always easy to discover, come to light."