The Civil Liberties Committee of the European Parliament will hold its first vote in February on whether or not ISPs and member states should block child pornography online across Europe.
A report by Member of Parliament Roberta Angelilli will be put to the committee to decide on directives on what should be done about the sexual exploitation of children.
Within this report, there is a recommendation to have child pornography removed from the web, requesting that EU member states should implement their own policies to stop the viewing and downloading of child pornography.
The report also recommends that ISPs should voluntarily develop codes of conduct to block websites containing child pornography in order to protect the victims.
The Council of Ministers also approved an informal text on the matter which states “mechanisms should also be put in place to block access from the Union’s territory to internet pages identified as containing or disseminating child pornography.”
This report notes that child pornography cannot be construed as “an expression of opinion” and that they need to make it more difficult for people to access this content.
However, European Digital Rights disagrees that content should be blocked, saying that doing this will warn those behind the sites that their activities have been identified.
They also claim that supporters of this involve countries which block other content to protect “gambling monopolies” and the music and film industries and are concerned it could lead to restricting communications not based in law.
The European Parliament will vote on the matter at the start of February.
